One mortgage company built something unexpected to stay ahead in AI race
Sourabh Chirimar (pictured top), CEO of The Mortgage Office, said the company has been reinventing itself since it was founded in 1978, and the latest reinvention was rethinking how the company would embrace the new technological age.
“TMO re-founds itself every five or seven years,” Chirimar told Mortgage Professional America. “Our capacity to change, our capacity to innovate — that’s what we all take pride in. It’s a big privilege to lead a company that has been able to reinvent itself.”
What they built
Chirimar said a rapid improvement in technology earlier this year allowed the company to rethink the path forward.
“In February this year, there was a massive transformation in capabilities,” he said. “The pace is so fast that just keeping up is a bit of a task for the engineering team. But good engineers, once they got to that initial pain of it, they are absolutely in love with how things work today. Because now it’s taken care of all these small things that were more about discipline and more about understanding syntax. And it’s letting people build.”
To take advantage of that new leap in technological capabilities, The Mortgage Office opened an innovation lab in San Mateo, California, tasking a small team with building a new product from scratch using AI, with no human writing a single line of code.
