Previous Artificial intelligence has quickly become the most talked-about technology in mortgage lending, but there are questions on where it actually delivers value. In this HousingWire conversation, Nima Ghamsari, Founder and Head of Blend sits down with HousingWire’s Allison LaForgia to unpack where AI is truly reshaping the mortgage origination process and where adoption still has a long way to go.
Ghamsari explains how AI agents can move beyond simple automation to handle complex workflows across the lending lifecycle. The conversation also explores Blend’s newly launched Autopilot, what it does differently from traditional rules-based automation, how lenders implement it, and why Ghamsari believes this is just the beginning of a larger shift in how mortgage operations will run in the years ahead.
“AI has evolved so quickly, even in the last four months, that most lenders … are just not really there yet,” Ghamsari said. “But it’s also a golden opportunity, because they do spend hundreds or 1000s of dollars per file, review, and documents and doing stare and compare and all those things.”
“I don’t like to talk about becoming AI native,” he added. “I like to talk about becoming agent first.”
For Ghamsari, that means shifting the first pass of mortgage work from people to software agents operating behind the scenes. “We want the agents to be listening and watching behind the scenes and doing a first pass before a human even touches it,” he said. “So by the time it gets to a human it’s already really ticked and tied.”
That philosophy is at the center of Blend’s Autopilot. Ghamsari said their goal is to make “the underwriters and processors and the consumer … 100x more efficient.” For borrowers, that means the system is “dynamically understanding what they need,” then responding in real time as new information surfaces. “They’re able to get through it in one 30-minute setting, instead of five 20-minute settings,” he said.
For operations teams, Ghamsari said, “By the time that they get a file, we want everything the consumer’s done to be fully underwritten, show up in a nice report for them. It’s a 20- to 30-minute exercise, as opposed to a multi-hour exercise.”
He described Autopilot as “ambient agents, agents that are working in the background as the consumer is entering any data field, as they’re uploading any document.” As that happens, “Autopilot is reading it, understanding it, underwriting against the guidelines and other fraud and other kinds of things that have to be checked.”
Ghamsari contrasted that with older rules-based automation. “If there was no data, we couldn’t really apply it,” he said of Blend’s earlier approach. “And … we only were able to write them for the majority cases and not the edge cases. And if you ask any underwriter, they say they spend all of their time on the edge cases.”
With Autopilot, he said, “We don’t care what kind of document it is, we don’t care what kind of data it is, we don’t care how complex the person’s income is. We’re going to solve this for you.”
To ensure the AI remains diligent, consistency is key. “You don’t want AI to hallucinate,” Ghamsari said. After running his own complex financial profile through the system repeatedly, “I ran it through 100 times, I got the same exact answer from the AI every single time.”
Adoption, he said, has been intentionally simple. “They flip a switch to turn it on,” he said. “It just works behind the scenes.” That simplicity appears to be resonating. “We had seven large customers turn this on in the first week without even calling us,” he said.
Looking ahead, Ghamsari sees Autopilot as the beginning of something broader. “This should apply to all parts of the loan process,” he said. “Every single consumer has a very personalized, very tailored experience that’s generated on the fly for them.” As he put it, “Humans who want to have a human touch should always have that ability,” but the industry should no longer force borrowers to wait for help that software can provide instantly.
