Speaking on a webinar for Kensington Mortgages, Andrei Lebed (pictured), CEO and co-founder of Koodoo, said: “We spent so much time and so much money into recreating what advisors could do using robotics, and I don’t think the outcome has quite lived up to the hype.”
He continued that fast forwarding to now, generative AI was “genuinely different to what we’ve tried before and robo advice, and it offers new opportunities and new capabilities”.
“I would challenge everybody here to try and drop any preconceptions they might have had about AI and approach it with a blank slate mentality,” Lebed added.
He noted that AI could help generate content, such as emails six months before mortgage rates expire.
Lebed outlined an example using ChatGPT to generate a draft of such emails, noting that you could give ChatGPT instructions to refine tone and add content.
He added that AI could “automate simple tasks”, “delight customers with slick automated experience” as well “transform” compliance departments.
One example Lebed outlined was generating a digital avatar that can use your likeness and voice to “delight clients”.
‘No plans’ to use AI to replace advisers
Koodoo recently created AI technology which passed the UK Certificate in Mortgage Advice Practice (CeMAP) exam, leading to some questions around whether AI will replace or support brokers.
Lebed said that it had “no plans to put AI technology in front of consumers in an advice capacity”.
“We have a brokerage ourselves, and we believe the value that AI brings is to help streamline and make more efficient the experience and operations of brokers and lenders alike, not to replace them,” he noted.
Lebed continued that the reason the firm had done so was because the quality of generative AI, which is AI that can produce content, was dependent on the large language model, deep learning algorithm that can perform a variety of natural language processing, that sits underneath it.
“We started to ask ourselves as we were developing some of our tools, would we hire somebody with no experience in mortgages, offer them no training and then ask them to help us with queries?
“Of course, the answer was no and for the same reason, we’ve had to make sure that our digital assistants, our LLMs, are able to meet the same level of quality and competence with respect of human system i.e. the CeMAP.”
