CTO Russell Petty says brokers who can't compete on data and consistency will be replaced
In an industry slow to evolve, Russell Petty isn’t speculating – he’s setting the terms. The CTO of Milestone Mortgage has built and sold brokerages, trained AI tools, and led digital overhauls. His bottom line: in today’s mortgage landscape, “branding and rates” won’t save you – “infrastructure will.”
“I got into the business 12 or 13 years ago, as a mortgage broker,” Petty said. “Ended up running all the technology and stuff for a small brokerage [and] we scaled up into one of the top 20 in the country.” He exited his first firm with a seven-figure deal before turning 25.
From fragmented tech to proprietary platforms
His latest focus is tackling the inefficiency that still dogs the wholesale channel. “I think the biggest issue in mortgage for the wholesale channel; is you have 5000 different portals that you've got to go into. You've got a lenders portal, you've got an AMC, you've got the VA portal, you got all these different things,” he said. “None of them really talk to each other.”
Milestone responded by building its own internal system. “The biggest thing for us was just building one central hub. We call it ‘the portal’, where everything kind of talks together. I think we're the only brokerage that has that, because we built it, and not a lot of them are doing that,” he said.
But the real leap came with AI. “I posted in, I think it was 2020, that AI will change the world more than the electricity and the Internet combined,” Petty said. That belief led to applied innovation – from reading documents and calculating income to deposit recognition. “Truly integrating artificial intelligence into our workflows, I think was the one of the biggest things that we've accomplished.”
Like most meaningful change, it wasn’t seamless. “We had 5000 inbound messages to it in the first three hours, and the server overloaded,” Petty said. The system now runs on AWS and Kubernetes – what he called a painful but essential shift.
AI is reshaping the front end, not just the back office
Petty isn’t sold on every flashy AI tool. “I don't like a lot of the AI avatar stuff, because I think that it kind of takes away the personability of it,” he said. “I just don't see the reason behind it.”
But he sees the front line – originators – as the first place AI will leave its mark. “I think you're going to see artificial intelligence really start ripping through the front end of mortgage first,” he said. “Most loan officers suck and they're lazy and they don't want to do anything… Even if the AI is 10% as good as they are, it will close 10 times the loans they do.”
That assessment may sound harsh, but Petty points to data that supports it. A 2024 STRATMOR study found over half of loan officers close fewer than four loans a month, despite widespread access to tools like CRM and POS platforms.
Big lenders are adapting accordingly. “They're not buying servicing companies and real estate companies. They're buying data so that they can train that AI and they can go in and do these things,” he said.
Culture, not code, is the real challenge
Milestone’s strategy is proactive: support high-performing originators and build systems to let them scale. “We just don't have those originators; all of our originators are strong,” Petty said. “They actually go out, they're consistent, they track their data.”
That culture of discipline informs every tech decision. “We find the problem and then we go find the technology rather than the other way around,” he said. “It really maximizes human to human, because we have the technology fixing the issues at the back.”
He’s wary of flashy tools that lack ROI. “The technology should be built around our process, not the process around our technology,” he said. “If it's not going to help your borrower have a better experience, and it's not going to make you close more loans, don't get the technology. Go find something else.”
Brokers must lead with AI – or get left behind
Petty’s message to the industry is blunt: there’s no fence-sitting. “AI. 100% AI. You have to be on it. There's not an option to do it,” he said. “If I had to pick one technology to use forever, that's what it would be.”
But the obstacle isn’t lack of access – it’s lack of rigor. “The AI cannot analyze your business if you’re not tracking your business,” he said.
For Petty, AI won’t eliminate originators. But it will eliminate the ones who can’t adapt. The message is clear: consistency, data fluency, and process discipline will determine who survives – and who gets replaced.
