[David] Let’s get over to Allen Pollack, another popular part of our podcast is the tech update. Allen, I am having so much fun recording these AI updates with Pavan Agarwal. And we just did one recently talking about AI agents, and we did one last week, and then we’re releasing a podcast this week with Garrett Locklear on AI agents. It is really amazing. And I received a call from a client says, “My boss is making me set up AI agents. How can I do this?” And again it sounds daunting, sounds like something there, but it’s actually pretty simple, Allen.
[Allen] Yeah, the interfaces, all the AI systems now are introducing AI agents, automation. They’re– again it’s a knife fight. They’re– I logged into Claude today, and it said, “How would you like a morning briefing?” And it said, “I can connect to your systems and automatically do it.” And I actually set it up. I connected to just my Gmail. And you can say what you’d like, and it says, “You want me to run this automatically every day?” And then it says, “Save it as a as a repeated task.” Everybody’s, doing that. The big thing in the mortgage industry is loan officers are gonna start getting extremely frustrated, or even employees, when they can’t connect outside tools to their corporate environments but many organizations are getting i’m sorry, David?
[David] And that’s a legitimate concern because you’re getting LLMs- Yeah … accessing your proprietary customer data, and there’s a lot of regulation around that. I mean- Oh, tons … you get frustrated with it, but the reality is that’s a real concern. I want, wanna-
[Allen] So if you wanna talk about regulation I’m gonna go a little bit out of order for how I I organized my segment today. Let’s talk about that. So the cybersecurity story your IT team needs to hear this week and Rob Chrisman also mentioned this, federal bank regulators, the folks who oversee your compliance, I’m speaking to everybody on this call, had their emails hacked for over a year. I’m gonna repeat that. Federal bank regulators, the folks who oversee your compliance, had their emails hacked for over a year and nobody knew. And if they can’t keep their own communication secure, what does that tell you about the threat that every financial institution is operating in right now? Boy. Yeah. You always seem to tee up my segments really well, David, without knowing what I was set to talk about.
[David] That is really interesting. That is really interesting.
[Allen] So I wanna give you the funny AI joke that just bypassed. Let me give you that one. This is a great one. It’s not really a joke. It’s more just “Oh, how about that?” AI is like a new loan officer who’s read every book on mortgages but has never actually talked to a nervous first-time buyer at 9:00 p.m. on a Sunday. Incredibly knowledgeable, technically correct, and still somehow asks you to re-upload your W-2 for the fourth time. Facts I love that. AI does not have a future. That’s great. I don’t always get Alice to come off mute, so I’m gonna take that as a 7 out of a 10. That’s usually- Maybe 7.5. I would say… That’s good. All right. So this past week, I’ve got some mortgage news, David, but this one’s really interesting. And speaking of David Hill i would think it was at the very first or the very second TMC conference back when I started NYLEX, New York Loan Exchange, the pricing engine. We were, I think, your very first pricing vendor as well. And those conferences were small and intimate, and they were amazing. We loved them. But let me back up now. So I went to a conference this past week, David, here in Jacksonville, Florida, called the Tech Conference, the Southern Technical Conference. And Jacksonville’s Chamber of Commerce, which is… Jacksonville, for those of you that don’t know, is the largest city in the country by land mass. It is. And their Better Business Bureau are, is huge. And the amount of companies… By the way, that includes FIS. It includes the old Black Knight, which is now Dark Matters. It includes Encompass, Ellie Mae, and the folks over there. It includes a lot of companies all in the Jacksonville area. It includes data centers. It includes all kinds of new AI companies being born out of Jacksonville, Florida. Anyways- Yeah … I did a unique deal with my new company, Senzi, where at the end of every keynote stage presence, which was four of them throughout this one-day conference, it was a full day, we had a video by one of the directors of the board of the Jacksonville Chamber of Commerce and this tech conference that was up on stage. And it was two giant screens on the left and right with a big stage and a lot of panels. And we did video. People didn’t know that it was an AI video and that it was generated with our content. And then at the end of that video, I showed up in the video and I said, “If you didn’t know, that was our digital twin of our conference director,” and et cetera. And then after the conference on Friday, we sent out… There would, by the way, there was close to I’d say be- around 750 individual companies and over 1,000- people there. It was a very big and very well-attended conference. I sent out over 1,200 messages with a video from the executive director of the entire conference thanking people for being there and asking them to take a survey, and we had an unbelievable overwhelming completion rate on watching the videos and clicking to actually go take a survey to help better next year’s event, and a very high number of people going to our website that we didn’t believe was gonna happen. It was crazy. I bring this up because- Interesting … the focus was AI, and that’s what everyone’s talking about, David. And what was really unique about the conference is that the Jacksonville Chamber of Commerce, and this should be happening in our mortgage industry, that’s the tie here, folks, is that they do an educational program. It’s free to all of the companies in Jacksonville, and a number, hundreds of people have gone through it. And there were people raising their hand and saying, “I went through the four pillars and it was amazing, and I learned a lot, and it helped me choose my next AI vendor.” But ultimately, they focused on security, compliance, and a couple things like that , in general. If you’re a company, by the way, in the Jacksonville area, you need to get in touch with me or get in touch with the Jacksonville Chamber of Commerce because what they’re doing in AI and helping, they’re bringing you for free. They’ll train your employees for free, and they help bring you certified- Oh, good companies. I shouldn’t say certified. Companies that are in their network that offer AI solutions that follow their ideals, these four pillars. And we should be doing this in the mortgage industry. So I bring that up. I know there are people doing education in AI in the mortgage industry, but there should be a lot. And it was interesting to me. It was eye-opening, David. I’ll pause after this. It was eye-opening to see how many people were actually raising their hands and communicating. It was a very interactive presentation. People loved it
[David] It’s really good. There is other communities, large cities that are doing this and realizing this. Maybe they’re taking a page out of the Jacksonville, Florida playbook. But there’s more and more of this showing up. It’s such an important thing. And no matter what size of community you have you should make a difference. And mortgage lenders that listen to this, how do you get your company promoted into these things? Why don’t you go to your chamber of commerce and you launch this, or help sponsor this, or help create the energy underneath it? They said, “That doesn’t get me loans.” It… No, but it gets you awareness, it gets you gets you out in the community and associated with making a difference. Alan, good report. Thank you. What else you got?
[Allen] I got more stuff. All right. I’m gonna- There you go. Since Mark’s not able to make it today for one of his famous rants, I’m gonna steal a little bit of his time. David, I want you… Do you have… Did anyone on the podcast today, do you have ChatGPT available, Claude, CoWork, anything? Yeah. Okay. I want you to go right away. I’m gonna read your minds. I don’t… So you’re g- I’m gonna ask you to ask your AI assistant, say, “Please provide me a random number between one and 25.” Go ahead and do that. I’m looking at everyone’s video. Do not say your number. Just let me know when you’re ready. Give me a thumbs up. Please give me a random number between one and 25 Okay. All right, I’m gonna guess your numbers. Wow. I can guarantee I’ll get it right. All right. Alice, David, you guys ready? Yes. All right. Yes. Okay. David, Alice, and David, you all have 17. Wow. Yes. I did both. I did Claude and Chat, and they both gave me 17. That’s right, and I did not hack into your computers this morning. Here’s why. Humans, and by extension LLMs, are trained on human text, and they associate randomness with numbers that feel arbitrary and avoid obvious patterns. So 17 isn’t a multiple of 5 or 10. It’s not even a round number, and it isn’t 13. It’s too cliché and spooky. Or 7, which is too obvious and lucky. It’s the Goldilocks number of looks random. And this, in the conference, in front of hundreds of people, a guy went up there and he had this… everyone do the same thing. Pull out your phone, and everybody had 17. So- I thought I’d leave you with that. I’ve got mortgage news, too, but that was more fun. I can bring up any of the mortgage news anytime, if you’re interested. You know what, David? Oh, yeah. I’ll throw one more, one more thing out for mortgage news. But let me pause on the, on my mind hunting work I did there for a second, see if you have any feedback. it is interesting how we’re looking to this, but I guess, what, I might turn this around as a question. What is the conclusion we’re drawing as it relates to the results we’re getting from ChatGPT? So much of it I’m learning about is how we ask the question, but you scripted us, and what exactly, but what if we changed it up a bit? Is there any way to get a different answer?
[Allen] I wasn’t prepared for you to say that, so I don’t know. But- I’m gonna play with that … the, the way it was presented was that everyone thinks AI is this super intelligent alien up in the sky that can do anything. And the point of this was that it is… It’s not scripted, but it is working off of knowledge and off of human behavior. It’s not some, it’s not some UFO- Right beaming down intelligence into us. That’s really the point of what this was.
[David] Yeah. It’s funny, and to your point on AI my fiance was going to bed the other night and said she was having a conversation and says, “What’s the joke of the day?” Just trying to be funny. And she finally, Alexa goes, “You do know I’m a bot, don’t you?” Just checking, and this conversation is going a little bit just beyond normal here. This is… And she was asking all these- That’s great … hard questions. “You do know I’m a bot, don’t you?” So I think they have some of those reminders there. But we’re using this more and more. Yeah. And it is coming mainstream.
[Allen] Last thing, David. Yeah. This is not mortgage related, but everybody, if I was a school teacher I would force every kid to go home and tell their parents, every single person listening to this podcast needs to go Google the following. It’s called Bottle Rocket, and they are having It’s tomorrow, so you’ll hopefully you may be able to sign up and get the post-webinar. It’s tomorrow, which is September 1st from 2:00 to 3:00 PM Eastern, and it’s called Should This Be AI? It’s a hands-on webinar for better decisions on should this or should this not be AI. And it has… It’s industry agnostic, and it has to do with understanding should everything that you’re looking at, whether it’s a vendor, whether it’s a bot, an agent, should it be AI? So again, it’s Bottle Rocket. That’s B-O-T-T-L-E R-O-C-K-E-T, and it’s tomorrow, September 1st from 2:00 to 3:00 PM Eastern.
[David] Wow. Interesting. Yeah. I put in Bottle of Rocket and brought up the comedy crime movie from 1996. So there you have it. Me too. So- I’ll find the link. It’s awesome. A lot of education’s needed around this, and the schools are focusing in on this more and more. Either join it and start using this or not, but it’s very good. Alan, I love your reports, your downloads from your segment. If you want to listen to any of these segments, you can go to our website, LincolnOnLending.com, and go in under Segments. And then if you say you just wanna binge on Alan’s tech updates, what did he say? What’s the websites? You could go there, and you don’t have to listen to anything else on the podcast, just listen to Alan, or just listen to Alice, or David, or any of us. It’s one of the things, so kudos to Ben De La Cruz, who supports this podcast on my staff, and he came up with that idea, and it’s really been working. So anyway, Alice was saying, listeners, that March of next year, 2027, we’ll have been doing this podcast for 20 years. And guess who’s been here from day one? Alice Alvey. Allen’s been here for 10 of the last 20 years. And Kittel he’s a newer guy, so we’ve let him in here just four years. But we’re so glad to have you all, and again, Bill and everyone else that’s makes this podcast so possible, we’re so grateful for them all. Thank you, listeners, for being here
Allen Pollack
, Chief Operating Officer, Tech Consultant
Allen Pollack, a Mortgage & Financial Services Technology Advisor, is a subject matter expert in the mortgage origination process along with software product management and software development.
In today’s financial services push to all things Digital, Allen has been helping lenders and financial services solution providers align their digital transformation and technology strategies by removing the human element of risk, and automating processes that drive efficiencies and margins into profits.
Over the course of his career, Allen has co-created and developed technology business models that have birthed highly successful, innovative solutions and companies.
Allen co-founded and served as CTO of New York Loan Exchange (NYLX), a loan product eligibility and pricing engine (PPE) that made an immediate impact on the industry, scaling the company quickly and forming partnerships with multiple mortgage and financial lending companies. In 2012, Allen was a co-founder of a merger between NYLX and Aklero Risk Analytics that created LoanLogics, A Mortgage Loan Quality and Performance Analytics company. Allen served as CTO where he continued to bring new and innovative product solutions to the market that made a significant impact to mortgage lenders that reduced risk, scaled business channels, and grew profits in a very competitive and highly regulated market.
Allen is also is mortgage and finance technology contributor on a weekly live industry podcast, Lykken on Lending, and is launching a new podcast soon to be released, TechStack Radio, dedicated to technology and innovation in Financial Services.