Jason Bressler explains why AI is the competitive advantage every mortgage broker needs

In this conversation from the New York Stock Exchange, HousingWire’s Allison LaForgia and Jason Bressler, Executive Vice President and Chief Technology Officer at United Wholesale Mortgage (UWM), discuss why AI for mortgage brokers is becoming a competitive necessity and why those who embrace it will be best positioned for the future. 

For Bressler, the day is about celebrating the broker community that has fueled UWM’s growth. “It means everything to us,” he said. “We have staked our reputation and built our business as the number one overall mortgage lender in the country because of our broker partners…To be able to celebrate and recognize them means everything to us.”

When the conversation turned to AI, Bressler explained that UWM’s philosophy has been to build technology in-house and provide it to brokers at no cost. “We’ve built and infused AI into everything that our broker partners use,” he said. “We give them away for free to our broker partners,” allowing even small independent shops “to compete with large banks and retail lenders.”

Rather than expecting brokers to master AI themselves, UWM has embedded it directly into the lending process. “They don’t even necessarily need to know it because we’ve built it all into our products and then we train them on how to use it,” Bressler said. “We’re automatically calculating income, calculating assets, finding the best products…As the documents are uploaded, we’re reading them, we’re extracting them…we’re doing so much of the work to make sure that the brokers are finding the absolute best product.”

The real differentiator, he argued, will be a willingness to learn mortgage broker AI.

“We have a lot of loan officers that are adopting AI. They’re doing their own research, they’re asking the right questions. Those will be the most successful loan officers moving into the rest of 2026 into 2027,” Bressler said. “The ones that are too afraid, that want to sit back and wait, they’re going to end up getting left behind.”

He urged brokers to experiment without fear. “Everything right now is about education…it’s about trying things that you don’t know, asking questions. There is no such thing as a stupid question as it relates to artificial intelligence.”

Bressler also described how mortgage broker AI is streamlining loan production behind the scenes. Documents are “automatically read, sorted, extracted, calculated,” giving underwriters and operations teams faster answers while allowing employees to focus on higher-value work. He also highlighted UWM’s MIA, a generative voice AI assistant that works around the clock to communicate with borrowers, freeing loan officers to “get more business, help more consumers and save them more money.”

Despite ongoing concerns about AI replacing workers, Bressler believes the technology will amplify, not replace, the human side of lending.

“The number one thing that separates humans from machines is the critical thinking and the communication and the human empathy,” he said. “Look at AI as a true assistant…delegate the work that is more menial…and then shift that extra time…into saving more money and finding the right products.”

His message to brokers was clear: “People will not be replaced by the AI. The people that will get replaced are the ones that aren’t using the AI.”

Looking ahead, Bressler encouraged brokers to take advantage of UWM’s SuccessTrack training and, above all, start using AI today. “Do not be afraid of the AI. Don’t be afraid to fail. Don’t be afraid to look stupid. Just go in and start with something.”