JR Afternoon with Chris Renwick
DBusiness Breakfast Series ~ AI Panel on Wednesday 12/3/24
Well, coming up next Wednesday, the next installment of D Business's breakfast series will be taking place at the Book Tower with the focus of a high leverage AI for your business. And there aren't many better people to talk about this than Jason Bresler, the Chief Technology Officer at United Wholesale Mortgage who will be a panelist at this event. Jason, it's good to have you. It's great to be here. Thanks for having me. You know, I would imagine, you know, you lead, what, the 1700 IT professionals at UWM. And if you're a panelist for this particular discussion, my guess is you've got to practice what you preach. So how does United Wholesale Mortgage utilize AI for what you guys do? Well, we're slightly different than a lot of other companies in that all 1700 plus of those people all work in Pontiac, Michigan, in the office every single day. And so what we do is we build everything. We don't buy, we don't acquire other companies, we don't use vendors. We build it all in house. Yeah. So it's very, very unique. Yeah, allows us to move very, very quickly. But we've been able to integrate AI into our existing product suite, but then also what's called Greenfield and build out brand new applications from the ground up just utilizing AI. So what's the messages? What's the message for businesses? Whether they're big, medium, small businesses? How do you encourage them to utilize this technology? Because I think from an outsider's perspective, looking in strictly from a business perspective, it can be incredibly helpful in streamlining efficiency, right? Maybe you maybe you don't need the entire workforce that you once did. But the realities are those challenges can be different for every business, depending on which side's there. Absolutely. They can be different for everybody. But what I would recommend first and foremost is AI, the way that it exists right now, AI has been around for 40 years. But the way that AI has taken this new light means there's all kinds of crazy innovation happening much more rapidly than it ever did before. For businesses, the most important thing is not just to get an AI product out, which for most people is a chat bot, something like chat GPT. What really people want to do is use AI to really reexamine their entirety of the workflow of their business, how they get customers, how they process those customers through from beginning to end. There's so many more efficient ways that business can be done right now where you can keep the entire workforce that you have, but not have to hire additional people in order to take on more volume. So you've been at this for a long time. How has this space changed in both your time at United wholesale mortgage or even before? How has this evolved and how will this change the way companies do business? Well, I think really for the first time people are really looking at data-driven metrics and data-driven decisions. And that's never really happened before. Everybody says they want to do that. Everybody says they want to predict the future. But for most of us, we always go off of our gut, especially if we're CEOs, if we're entrepreneurs, if we're sea levels. We always kind of go off of our gut of the things that have worked and what hasn't. But with AI and machine learning and everything that's wrapped around it now and all of these great products that have come into the marketplace, you can really take your data, clean it, scrub it, and then make real predictive decisions based off of that data, instead of just kind of going with the flow and really hoping for the best and hoping that market conditions kind of swing into your favor. Well, and acquiring that data, right, when you run a successful business, you get a lot of that data and making sure you know how to use it, right, how to read it, how to apply it. That's a huge step in all of this. Absolutely. And for a lot of, really, I would say all of us, we have tons of data, just a lot of it's junk, you know, we have people that are just entering information in, just keystroke after keystroke. AI and machine learning really allows you to clean that data up and then have real like what's called a single source of truth. And you have real data that you can start to build off of and start to make real business driven decisions to really start gaining more market share. Now, look, I mean, in terms of the grand scheme of time, right, this is relatively new, but there has been a lot of steps forward at light speed. It feels like over the last five, 10, 15 years. And the realities are, I'm sure there's still a little hesitancy for a lot of people. I think if you're doing what you're doing at United Holseum Mortgage, where you're creating these platforms from scratch, you have the ability to control it completely. That might not be the case for other businesses. So if there are people that are a little, if they've got some trepidation about this, how do you assure them that A, there are good models out there that you can utilize or B, that this really is the future? How do you assure people who might be a little on the fence about it? Well, the first thing that you want to do, especially as a business leader, as a business owner, is talk to other business leaders and business owners to see what other people are doing, especially in your field. So you have a decent idea overall of how people are leveraging AI and machine learning and what that actually means for them. But really what you want to do is you want to go out and start doing some research on companies and partners that are out there that offer a specific kind of service that seems like it may make sense for you. And what you want to do is take, just like if you were going to have a generator, for instance, installed at your house, you probably get two, three, four different quotes to make sure you were finding somebody that you really jogged with that made a lot of sense into what they were talking about. You want the same thing when you jump into your AI journey. You want to make sure that you're finding somebody who can really come in and assess the overall business workflow, the data that you have, and then say, "Hey, here's a solution that we could start to build off of, but this isn't just a one-stop shop. What we'd want to look at is how do we integrate this into everything that you have to first get you more efficient and then start to make you more of a technology powerhouse using this technology?" Have those conversations that you've had with other business leaders? Has that helped the way that you shaped your technology building at UWM? A little bit, overall, I always tell people I'm a unicorn when it comes to what I do and the fact that I know, and the fact that I've only been in the mortgage world and I've only been in IT for my entire career, which is now 27, 28 years. I understand the business aspect very well, and I understand the technology aspect very well. I take that Steve Jobs approach of, I'm not even going to ask you what you want. I know what you want. I'm going to give it to you, and then I'm going to come after all your feedback. What could I do better? That's really the approach that we've taken, and having 1,700 people working alongside me makes it much easier for us to solution and build and innovate and do all those things where most people don't have that luxury. Yeah, and you've got a team that are very clear on what you're trying to accomplish for the company, and I'm sure that certainly helps. Well, it sounds like it's going to be a great panel. It's the D Business Breakfast series leveraging AI for business and career success. It's at the Book Tower next Wednesday, December 4th, 830 to 1030, and if you are a business leader and you want to be involved, you want to be there, and hear a lot of this discussion, you can head on over to dbusiness.com for those tickets. Jason Breisler with United Wholesale Mortgage. Thank you, my friend. Always good to talk. As well as you, thanks so much for having me. Yeah, you got it. We'll take a break, get you caught up on a couple of pieces of news coming up at 3.15, 3.18 rather, Todd Flood will join me here on JR Afternoon.
November 25, 2024 ~ Chris speaks with United Wholesale Mortgage's Chief Technology Officer, Jason Bressler about next week's DBusiness Breakfast Series AI Panel. How can you get involved?