Weekly AI Update: The AI Gold Rush: Why Most Companies Are Digging in the Wrong Place

The AI gold rush is in full swing, but many organizations are chasing the latest tools while overlooking the asset that will determine long-term success—their own data. In this episode of the Weekly AI Update, David Lykken and AI innovator Pavan Agarwal break down the biggest insights emerging from the AI4 Conference, discuss why enterprise AI strategy matters more than isolated AI deployments, and explore how AI agents are transforming the way businesses operate. They also examine the growing importance of proprietary AI patents, intelligent automation, and trusted data as the foundation for competitive advantage. If you’re looking to move beyond AI hype and build a sustainable strategy that delivers real business value, this conversation provides practical insights into where AI is headed and how forward-thinking leaders can position themselves for the future.

[David] Listeners, it’s time for another AI update, and we have our special guest as we do every one of these AI updates, Pavan Agarwal. Pavan, good to have you with us.

[Pavan] It’s so much fun to be here. And I’m in Vegas today, as you know, for the big AI4 conference. So something like eight thousand, ten thousand people here. The registration line, thank God I’m a speaker ’cause I went right in. But the registration line went like I don’t know, must have been a three hour registration line, went around the Venetian, literally like down the hall through the casino. It was crazy.

[David] Wow. It’s crazy. Yeah. I was on their website as I when I found out, first of all, chasing you around the world, talking to you in this world. I mean, you literally bounce around the world like few people I know. You’re true international travelers. So it’s good to catch up with you now that you’re in at least on US soil. but when I went to the website, the and folks, you can go there. It’s AI4.io. You go to the website and they encourage you to go over to the resources, there’s a tons of releases listeners out there, but then the speakers page. Pavan, when I was going through the speakers page, I’m going, I must have clicked on the attendee list because there’s twelve hundred and sixty speakers listed on the speakers page, of which, of course, you’re one of them. And you’re doing a keynote there. I know it’s, but there are some notable people at this conference. And my new friend that you’ve introduced me to is Granger is there. I can’t wait to I’ll be interviewing him little bit later this afternoon. There’s so much good things going on, but you have some big news that you want to share with our audience. What is it, Pavan?

[Pavan] Yes. Yes. And you’re getting exclusive on this. It happens here. So folks, tune in if you want the exclusive, want the latest breaking news, tune in on Lykken on Lending. So big huge news. We just literally last night when Japan woke up nine AM Japan time, we executed the first hundred million dollar outside money into Celligence, the parent company of Angel AI. So that came in at the valuation of 120 billion. So that gets that press release is going to be out any minute now. It’s just going to hit the press wire and that first hundred million is the just the initial lead up. It’s a multi-billion dollar funding round that we’re going through right now. And it’s just the just to get the ball rolling. So we’ve got the first hundred million locked in.

[David] That’s amazing. Yeah. Well, congratulations on that. Can you talk about the investor at all that’s willing to come and bring that in, or is that the confidential?

[Pavan] So it’s a group of investors from Japan. They consolidate their money into a US corporation called Mortgage Treasury. Okay, and that corporation, the CEO of that corporation is the former is a Japanese American and the former governor of Hawaii, who’s the CEO of Mortgage Treasury. These are very serious people here. And the money coming into this, into mortgage treasury is some of the largest families of Japan. you know, the people who built Japan post World War II, those families are investing their money into mortgage treasury. And the mortgage treasury has invested its money into for the last two years, it’s been buying the non QM loans that Sunwest originates and that are manufactured by Angel AI. So that the charter for Mortgage Treasury is that it will only buy products that has been manufactured by Angel AI so that it doesn’t have to worry about the product quality. Okay, so it’s kind of like this. So this group of investors they’ve been going to like imagine you’re going to a restaurant for the last two years every day and you and you eat the cooking and you love it. You love the restaurant, you love the people, they love the service. And then two years later you say, you know what? Darn it, I’m going to go invest in that in that restaurant. If I’m spending so much money at the restaurant, I’m gonna own a piece of it.

[David] Yeah, that’s great. Well, and congratulations on that. And then I know there’s a lot more to follow. I had the privilege of meeting a number of those investors with you in Dallas, when we were all together.

[David] It’s it’s really exciting. And I think so many people are trying to figure out an AI strategy. You’re way beyond that. You have an AI strategy, a proprietary technology with patents around and those that are developing technology, you better pay attention to what you’re doing. Pay attention to the patents that Pavan has. That’s kind of like a public service announcement because you have so many patents in the area. And that may be worth touching on just briefly. I mean, you protecting your technology, your knowledge through patents, which is totally appropriate. How many patents do you have right now and how many are pending?

[Pavan] I believe we’ve crossed one hundred forty. The most recent patent is the one that you and Arin had a pack podcast on just two weeks ago, which is real world data uncertainty. It solves that problem, which is a fundamental problem of all AI models. This is a very, very big, very valuable patent because and then that’s one of the things we’re gonna be talking about the fact that AI is eating itself, right? But the I’m being interviewed by a very notable Forbes reporter. his name is Tor Constantine.

[Pavan] And he’s interviewing me and his line of work is about how to prevent AI model drift, how to keep AI models growing. But right now there is a big problem because AI models are being fed by AI generated content. And so what happens is their view, the perspective of the world becomes very narrow because they start feeding on the same thing over and over again. And so the edge cases on the data disappears from their view, right? That gives them tunnel vision, our patents about how to how an AI model can produce predict what like how humans predict intuitively what’s going to happen next, right? the AI model predicts the same way. So it can construct meaningful data to fill in the gaps. So it’s the real world data uncertainty because in the real world, human beings receive limited amounts of data, right? any picture you look at, your brain processes to sort of a general pattern of it. Okay. But we’re able to understand the picture, right, and fill in the gaps in our mind. Okay. So this is the same idea. We’re accomplishing something similar with this new algorithm. And the paper was published in a top tier peer review scientific journal and we even open sourced the source code to to how we did this.

[David] Wow. Well, congratulations on all of the successes and the patents you’re developing. But this is really leading into where you’re going. And this investment, $100 million of initial investment, is really opening up to the point where you’re going to be able to you’re creating your own capital markets for invest for investing in

[David] That I think that’s really exciting. I mean the Japanese and many other countries got burned in the housing crisis for how we underwrote loans. And they started looking at that. and so we got to find this is still a great place to invest. The mortgage backed security is a great place to invest, but it was how they’re underwritten. So when they found you, Japanese found you, they said this has got certain bit certainty into it. Guaranteed.

[David] You have a guarantee with it that when it goes through if you go directly through Sun West, your your mortgage company, there’s a guarantee with that decision, which is it’s not listening a probabilistic answer, it’s giving a deterministic answer with certainty. And that’s where we added Dr. Arin’s interview. So we’re gonna go, it’s worth going back and listening to that interview. We’ll put a link to that interview that we did, but let’s talk about the AI4 conferences going on. There are 1,260 speakers. It’s going on over three days. I haven’t done the math on how many. That’s a lot of content that’s going on. I’m on the website right now looking at the content and all the white papers that are being released and was reviewing some of those and getting ready for you. So there’s a lot. What stands out at this conference, Pavan, for you as you look at it?

[Pavan] Well, I spent the day yesterday at the conference and I was actually on another podcast yesterday. and actually right after this I’m rushing over there to be on another podcast as well. so the whole conference seems seems like almost everyone I talk to is talking about AI agents. Like we we’re doing this with the AI agents and we’re doing that with the AI agents, and we’re going to save you so much money and save businesses so much money by setting up the AI agents. That’s the whole premise and the business model that everyone is executing and so they’re kinda in my opinion, they’re late to the game because as you know, we created the concept of AI agents back in 2012. We call them cells. I think is a better name than agent.

[Pavan] And that’s why the company’s called Celligence. So and I’ve sat through a number of quite a few pitches yesterday. I’ve just listening, observing, absorbing the information and listen and understanding what other people are doing with AI agents and the other big exciting news that we have is we we’re announcing project and we call it Project Sena, S E N A, Project Sena. And that is going live on Monday, August 10th, which is the a massive ecosystem of AI agents being added to Angel AI. We’ve been working on this for months. we did an early announcement of this was coming back in April. Now it’s August 10th is being switched on active. So with AI agents embedded into Angel AI, every task that you do right now, you have to rethink and say, I don’t need to do that anymore. Or I’m gonna do it dramatically differently so that if a task takes you 60 minutes, you’ll spend one minute and 59 of the minutes will be spent done by the AI agent. So it’s an amazing thing. AI agents basically give you an army of people, right? An army of assistants working for you, right? And you don’t have to hire anybody. You just flip on agents and you just turn on one after the other.

[David] Yeah, and it’s for the task. It’s more of a task based solution, correct?

[Pavan] Right. Yes. Right. And the difference between what we’re doing and what the other startups that’s folks are doing, the other startups are going into a they’ll introduce themselves to a business and they’ll say, We’ll save you X amount of money, you know, let’s set up your agents. And then they go through a sort of a long, expensive setup launch process to install the agents in their business, right? We made it a single push of a button. You just select the agent you want. And go and in under a minute, the agents up and running and managing your email or responding to your voicemails or responding to those or setting up your managing appointment calendar, creating marketing content, you know, you name whatever you could think of. And if you go to we list out some of the agents on the release site, so it’s just go to angelai.com/sena And you can also read the meaning of the name, why we call it sena. So it’s a very interesting conversation. Just we can have a conversation with just on why it’s called Sena, but basically it’s a short form of a Buddhist concept called Ushrasena, and that is also a Japanese word, by the way, which is interesting as well. But the Ustrusena is a army, a legion of divine angels to protect you. So Sena is is is abbreviation, is a short form of that. And so angel agents is a is a is basically a divine legion and divine army of agents to protect your business.

[David] Wow. That’s a man. Which comes back the brilliance of the name Angel AI. And I love that, which gives you now more reason to explain it. So Sena, S-E-N-A.

[David] I gotta go check that out. Gotta check that out all the time. What are some of the other things that you’re hearing about at the conference? There’s a lot of people trying, I get as I look through all the topics and everyone’s talking. It’s really becoming pretty obvious that a lot of people really don’t have a strategy. They’re shooting at holes, as it appears like they’re trying to plug holes rather than having a cohesive beginning to end strategy.

[Pavan] Exactly. Then there there’s a huge amount of money to be made by startups and consulting companies to approach a traditional company and say, you know, we have this solution that we can save you money. Right. and it’s a slow expensive process. So I’m I’m seeing a lot of mid-size and smaller companies jump towards that. Okay. what I’m s also seeing and I’m getting a lot of feedback from larger you know, publicly traded companies that are the the C suites of those companies are kind of during the headlights right now. And they’re actually sitting on a gold mine because they have so much data, so much quality data that is available to them that if they invested the time and money and if they actually had an understanding of what they’re holding on to, if the C suite actually understood what they had and how to use it, their companies are, you know, a hundred times more valuable than what they are today. But they don’t have that vision and they’re too busy blocking and tackling that they’re forgetting about this massive asset they already have and they’ve they’re basically throwing that asset away, you know. It’s kinda like I I’d love to make a I would like to make a history reference here, right? It’s like when Napoleon was busy, you know, trying to conquer Europe, he gave away North America to us, right? Right. Yeah,

[Pavan] right? It’s it’s you know, like you were f you’re you’re in a deep fight over the scraps, right, over your pride when when the real asset was on the other side of the world, that’s what North America’s worth so much more than what he was fighting for. And in in Europe. And he already owned it.

[David] Yeah. That’s that is a really good example of someone being misdirected and and having the wrong focus. When

[Pavan] Yeah. Yes. Yes. Yes. It’s getting it’s getting too much in the weeds of today, that of the current battle, and you miss the big picture. And that’s what w that’s so that’s a common theme we’re seeing is half the companies just completely are missing the big picture. And they don’t even understand the massive pile of gold that they have within their organization, which is their data. And they don’t know how to use it and the managers are afraid to say anything to the board because then the board will put them under pressure, like, why don’t you do something about it? So it’s kinda like don’t ask, don’t tell situation. So half the company there, the other half are like, well, we gotta do something and they’re they’re s you know, in my opinion, wasting a lot of money on you know, disparate startups and wild ideas and and maybe they’re they get some return and they get some value for it, but not not nearly what what is is possible. And that’s why we created Angel AI Sena. That’s why we are doing the Sena release so that we have a simple one button go and it’s Angel agents, these are AI agents that anybody and everybody can use. You don’t need you don’t need to hire a team of consultants and you don’t need IT experts to fire up agents and start you know simplifying your life. Right. And and I right now I’ll point to how important agents are and how important Angel AI’s platform is to you. There was a study Harvard did about three years ago that I think maybe in fact farther back. think it was like seven years ago, they did this study. Harvard did this study that said forty two percent of your life, of your daily life, okay, is wasted because it could be handled by a personal assistant.

[David] You start yeah, when you start thinking about it, it is it’s really extraordinary what how people need to re should be able to refocus into the things that will give them much greater success, right? Like Napoleon focusing on conquering Europe when he gave up all the North America here. that’s a great that’s a great example. And then how when if you were to advise someone on how to redirect their attention as they start using these agents, what should they be looking at? Not playing more golf, but to succeed in today’s business, what should they be looking at? What’s wisdom, what’s Pavan’s wisdom on that?

[Pavan] Well first of all, don’t panic. Right. you know, there’s a lot of FOMO being created, like, if you don’t do something like right now, you’re gonna miss the boat and and things like that, like look at this company’s head, that company’s head. First of all, don’t panic, right? so because if you try to do something in a rush and a panic, you’re you’re gonna mess up. Okay. So second, then take your time the most important phase of a project is the beginning phase. It’s the planning phase. Take your time to understand and plan. So even if that takes longer, even if it looks like a competitor, just if you read a fresh lease competitor, just install this agent or that agent, and you’re like, no, I’m falling behind. If you’re properly planning and preparing, then you’re not falling behind, you’re ahead. You may just you may not see it immediately, but you’re ahead. So understand, plan, prepare. and of course, the shortcut is just use Angel AI. That’s just solves all your problems right there. You’re ready to go. So we’ve already done all the all the all the hard work and heavy lifting for you.

[David] Yeah, it’s it’s so true. Pavan, I so always love catching up with you. Appreciate you dial in and joining me today in Las Vegas. It’s great to have you here, man. I yeah.

[David] I encourage everyone to check it out. There’s a lot of content on the website already from what has been presented. A lot of white papers, very interesting. But it’s yeah, there’s a lot of noise out there, Pavan. And I think that’s what I’m sorting through. All the white papers out there, I’m realizing just how much confusion and noise there is. It’s really important that people pay attention to these AI updates that we bring you. We’re gonna be recording another one with our good friend Granger here in a little bit later this afternoon. Can’t wait. what a brilliant guy. I met him through you. So tease that interview up. We’re gonna to be releasing this interview before we do that. So tell us a little bit about Granger, how you met him, and why you were so excited to have him come on my podcast and share his wisdom.

[Pavan] Well, of course, I met Granger, an amazing I don’t very, very high net ultra, ultra high net worth person, amazing character, amazing soul. And the where you meet amazing people like this is at of course a mindset summit. So if you guys haven’t gone to a mindset summit, go to a mindset summit. The next one we’re doing is with is with NARAP and Avance in September, which is going to be like ten thousand realtors converging here again in Vegas at the Bellagio. And we’re running the AI track during the NARAP National Conference. So check that out, it’s marketed under the name Avance Global, A V A N C E Global. that’s our next Mindset. Already go to Mindset Summit dot com and and and it’s over there. So yeah and

[David] Yeah. It’s a one-up topic. I heard him speak there. I was literally, I was so blown away that this guy thinks out of the box. And then I ran to you and I said, Can I get his contact information? He said, Better yeah, come on meet him. And then we met, we he and I clicked like that. And turns out, you know, a lot of people that he he’s got a lot of experience in the mortgage space. So I’m thrilled to get to know him and have him on. Thank you so much, Pavan, for joining us here. Safe travels, friend. Enjoy the conference and good

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Pavan Agarwal is a renowned leader in the mortgage lending industry and a pioneer in bringing artificial intelligence to the financial markets. Agarwal serves as the President and CEO of Sun West Mortgage Company and Celligence International, LLC.