Joe Welu on how AI is changing customer relationships

HousingWire

On today’s episode, Editor in Chief Sarah Wheeler talks with Joe Welu, CEO and Founder of Total Expert, about AI and how companies are using it to turn relationships into appreciating assets.  Related to this episode:  Becoming a 10X Lender: Reimagining Your Organization in the Agentic Era https://www.housingwire.com/events/ai-summit-2026/becoming-a-10x-lender-reimagining-your-organization-in-the-agentic-era/  HousingWire | YouTube⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCXDD_3y3LvU60vac7eki-6Q  Buy one, get one FREE tickets to the Mortgage Banking Summit on October 1st https://events.housingwire.com/mortgage-banking-summit-2026  More info about HousingWire https://lnk.bio/housingwire  Want more from Sarah? Don’t forget to subscribe!  The HousingWire Daily podcast brings the full picture of the most compelling stories in the housing market reported across HousingWire. Each morning, listen to editor in chief Sarah Wheeler talk to leading industry voices and get a deeper look behind the scenes of the top mortgage and real estate.

Transcript

00:11Welcome, everyone. My guest today is Jo Weilu, CEO and founder of Total Expert, to talk about

00:17AI and how companies are using it to turn relationships into appreciating assets. This

00:23is going to be a great conversation, so let's dive in. Jo, welcome back to the podcast.

00:29Hey, thanks, Sarah. Glad to be here. Always good to chat with you.

00:33Same. I really wanted to do this after hearing you speak at our AI Summit, which was just a couple

00:39weeks ago. It's a really powerful session. We had a lot of people ask about it afterwards.

00:44We have an on-demand way to watch those sessions. It's just been really popular, and I understand

00:50why, because I feel like you guys are, in that session, you really explained what it was that

00:56was sort of a leap for you, where AI is not just like, oh, a faster horse, I think is

01:02what you said at one point. It's not just like, oh, I have a horse. Now the horse is running

01:05faster. It's like, but this is a real change in mindset. So I'd love to dig into that with

01:10you today.

01:11Yeah, absolutely. So great event. And Dallas really enjoyed being able to talk about how

01:17we see the future of the industry and the things that AI has really allowed us to do from reimagining

01:26what's possible in our industry. And if you think about my concept is really around how do you become

01:34a 10x lender? How do you drive 10x or exponential outcomes in the business? And utilizing the

01:42technology as a tool was the spirit of the conversation. And most innovation, if you think

01:49back over the last few decades, has been really incremental. And if you go back to the digital

01:55mortgage, and there's just incremental, incremental, this innovation has the ability and is driving what

02:04I consider just profound, dramatic shifts in how we think about serving the end consumer,

02:12that whole customer journey. And then more importantly, how do we think about elevating

02:17our people inside our organizations to the very highest and best use and sort of changing the entire

02:26narrative around what's possible, right? And that's the exciting part is the limitations that we

02:33sort of always assumed. In many ways, AI has allowed us to remove those limitations and create

02:39organizations and businesses and outcomes that were just simply not possible. So that was the spirit of

02:46the discussion. I think something that you said on stage was something that I heard several speakers

02:51say. And then when I was talking to people afterwards, and it was like in the midst of them,

02:57you know, starting to use AI more and looking at it, they realized they were building the wrong thing.

03:02They realized they had the wrong focus, because, you know, they were sort of treating it like that,

03:08like, let's just make the horse go faster. So maybe you can talk about that, like when you realize

03:12like, hey, no, this is a whole different mindset. Well, so yeah, this is that's great, great question.

03:18And first of all, I think it's important to remind ourselves that all of our businesses, ours included,

03:25in many lenders, you know, we have some awesome customers, and it's just a privilege to serve those

03:30organizations and collaborate with them. But if you think about the way those businesses and the way

03:36these businesses have functioned, the way lending mortgage has functioned for years and years,

03:41and those patterns are deeply hardwired in human behavior, and so are the limitations or the obstacles

03:50that have always been there. And so to fully harness the potential, in my opinion, of this agentic wave

03:59and the superintelligence revolution that's AI, to fully capture it, you have to step back and say,

04:06maybe I should just totally reimagine the business from a first principles approach.

04:14And if I was to start with a blank canvas, how would I do it now? And that's, that's, I

04:20think,

04:21really where the breakthroughs are happening. And, you know, for us and the category, I'll just give

04:26you some examples, right? So we've, we've built tools and capabilities to serve the, mostly the sales

04:33and marketing, customer engagement workflows in the organizations. And if I think about how

04:40organizations have been able to get value from the technology, historically, their ability to get

04:47that value was changing human behavior, getting people to log into systems, and complete tasks that

04:54maybe they didn't even really like to do in the first place. And it was always make this button

04:59different or make this dashboard different. And it wasn't necessarily really getting the outcome.

05:05It was saying, okay, if I complete this task with this technology, I'm going to get value. And what we

05:12think

05:13in largely lots of the innovation that's happening, has the ability to do is saying, okay, maybe it's not just

05:21about getting people to log in and slightly iterate, iterate on a process that we've had for years. Maybe it's

05:28just

05:28reimagining the whole engine and the whole process to where I can get value from technology

05:37autonomously and automatically, that's going to be created and delivered for the way we serve customers

05:43as an example, as a lender, the way I serve my consumer, right? If I think about one of the

05:49biggest

05:49opportunities for lenders is growing lifetime value of those very important customer relationships, yet

05:56to fully grow that lifetime value, I was heavily dependent on call centers and people remembering

06:03to send out follow-ups and communicate. And now I can use an agentic or AI plus the human. And

06:12those

06:12two things can work seamlessly together to really unlock that potential.

06:18Well, you know, in the past, if you're a business owner, and you've, you know, grown up a business,

06:23there wouldn't really be a time when you're like, oh, I should just start over. First of all,

06:27you made all the decisions along the way that got you there, because they were the best decisions.

06:32And then there was no avenue to do that. Like, oh, okay, so you're going to start over and do

06:37what?

06:37And now it's like, not only can you see what is possible, but like, there is a way to get

06:42there.

06:43There is. And it's, I would say, you know, one of the key learnings that I shared with the audience

06:47in Dallas was there will be resistance, okay? Because naturally people resist change. And so

06:55for you, I believe fundamentally that every business, ours included, has to be examining

07:03how do we disrupt ourselves and sort of reinvent how we're unlocking value for our customers,

07:10how we're empowering our people to do the best work they can and elevating. It's not really,

07:15I don't really think about it as, I need to replace people. It's more, how do I elevate those

07:20people to their very highest and best use of their brainpower, their superpowers, their talents?

07:28And to do that requires a lot of process change in the organizations and leadership,

07:36in my opinion, that has to be bold and say, you know what, if we don't challenge our legacy process,

07:45our legacy way of thinking, that our organization becomes at risk in the coming years. And I just

07:52think it's that clear to me. And it's the way that we're innovating internally and the way we're

07:58helping serve most of our customers, a lot of them have that mentality. And so we've had more fun in

08:04the

08:04last year, being able to go in with leaders and executives and saying, okay, how do we reimagine

08:11a, you know, a better engine that can create business and revenue and outcomes and still elevating

08:21and putting our people in the sweet spot as much as possible. And we're having those conversations

08:25collaboratively. And then you're building the capability with that lens versus saying,

08:33hey, can you make your CRM, you know, do this versus that? And it's just a way bigger force multiplier

08:42when you change the game you're playing, which is I'm going to leverage the technology to create

08:47outcomes as my primary goal and elevate my people as my primary goal versus just influencing

08:55human behavior, which may not get you that incremental growth and outcome.

09:00So one of the things that we've seen over the last year, and I mean, I feel like we could

09:04say

09:04over the last week, right? If you're working with models, I mean, things change so fast, but is the

09:10fact that for the AI to really work the way it needs to, they have to have context. They have

09:19to

09:19understand it. And we, you know, we've seen that over the last couple of years where it's like,

09:22oh, you know, they, they can, you know, you might have, if you're a loan officer and you're sitting

09:26there behind a desk, it might tell you things about this or, oh, they might be, they might be good

09:31for

09:31this, this kind of loan. Tell me what the next level of that is when, you know, what's happened

09:37last year? What, what does that customer context mean now?

09:40So context is everything, right? So it, it sort of always has, has been, if you think about it,

09:49but context today. So we have a set of capabilities that we call customer IQ, which is ultimately,

09:56how do we bring together and aggregate the most comprehensive profile, comprehensive financial

10:03profile of every customer, every interaction, and then make that accessible at the exact right

10:10moments to either AI agents that can complete tasks or my people that are helping the customer,

10:16right? And so if I think about my best salespeople, my best experiences, it was always, I had a precise

10:24way of communicating with that end consumer on what was important to them, what mattered to them,

10:29I'm having the most relevant conversations, I'm delivering value to them in that moment. And so the

10:35limitation historically has been, well, if I have a salesperson, what can we show in a legacy CRM that's a

10:42static database? And if they forgot to enter it into the database or the CRM that I don't have it.

10:49And so

10:50thinking about it now, from a position of super intelligence that is always available and

10:57accessible to the loan officer, the salesperson, while they're having those conversation, or it's

11:04coming into the conversation via an AI agent. So, you know, we have voice and SMS agents that can

11:11communicate with the loan officer and the consumer simultaneously and bring them into the loop.

11:16And so, you know, context is the fuel that, in my opinion, really unlocks all the magic for both what

11:25we think is not going away, which is this agentic revolution where I need agents, AI agents to complete

11:32tasks for my people. And my people have to be able to always understand what's going on it. And

11:37ultimately, know what's the most important thing I need to say to this customer? And when is the precise

11:43moment where it really matters? And all of that is fueled by having robust context. But that context

11:51doesn't mean anything if I don't have it structured and set up in a way that it can be accessed

11:58by other

11:59agentic capabilities. So we have a very much of an abundance mentality in this innovation wave.

12:06I don't think of it as a, hey, you either need to buy, you know, this from us, or it's

12:13always an

12:14and, right? So I think every organization, you're going to be ideally innovating internally, and then

12:20you're going to leverage capabilities. And we are fortunate to, you know, be trusted by 18 of the top

12:2925 lenders in America, rely on our capabilities and trust our capabilities as part of their strategy. And so but

12:38they have enormous flexibility in how they work with that. And, you know, big layer that we provide to them

12:43is

12:43context. And some of the great outcomes we've been able to unlock this last year has been really about bringing

12:50that context into every interaction with a customer, you know, as a consumer, that context, we're so used

12:56to it now, right? We're like, okay, Netflix is like, hey, because you like this, and in my case, it's

13:02really scary. It's like, because you liked, you know, I married a serial killer, here's the next one you

13:08should see. Or, you know, in Amazon, just anything that we're doing. And so that this to me is one

13:15of the

13:16highest and best uses of AI. Like, I know, we all know our information is being collected everywhere.

13:21So like, make it, make it serve me in that way. It make it serve the humans, right? And that's

13:29how

13:29we think about building. And we think it should take a sales organization, a loan officer, a salesperson,

13:36an advisor, and elevate them with superpowers that on their own, they would have never been able to

13:42unlock, right? A perfect memory, a perfect amount of follow up, a way to put high value things in front

13:51of their customers automatically that they never would have had the ability to do. And then what

13:55they get to do is what most of them are great at and love to do, which is, I'm in

14:01the marketplace,

14:02I'm educating customers, and I'm giving them advice in the moments that really matter to the consumer.

14:08The consumer wins, the salesperson wins, the organization wins. And so we just think it's

14:14incredibly fulfilling to be able to start building and delivering on those, on those things is simply

14:21more possible. And, you know, your Netflix example, I think is a powerful one. And if you really want to

14:28think about context and how it matters to the consumer and how often our industry has gotten that wrong,

14:38just imagine, you know, I know when my daughter's around in the summertime and I log into my TV and

14:44I'm in her Netflix account, right? And the information and the recommendations that it's making to me are

14:52for her and how awful that or how just different that feels, right? Now, imagine if I'm a consumer and

15:00my lender is giving me recommendations that have nothing to do with my financial journey where I'm

15:08at in that financial journey. It's really a good analogy. So I love that, Sarah. I'm going to use

15:13that if that's okay. Also, it kind of makes you mad because you're like, you should know this about

15:16me. You know what I mean? It's like, you should know this about me. Well, that's one of the things,

15:21one of the buzz topics that I heard at the AI Summit was from your session. I heard in different

15:26conversations throughout the day, people were like, well, it's like Joe said, you're going to get

15:30resistance. Like, yeah, you're just got to expect resistance. I think that resonated with a lot of

15:34people and would love to know like what you did internally, but also how you help your clients

15:40and be like, you know, this is how you overcome that resistance.

15:46Yeah. So we're constantly, to answer your question simply, we're constantly evolving and leaning into

15:52that, right? Because many of our customers, and these are what you would consider in some cases,

15:58some very large and sophisticated organizations, yet the single biggest thing they struggle with is

16:04saying, hey, we understand that there's sort of a new blueprint for what success looks like in

16:10deploying technology and enabling our sales organization. We need help doing that. We need help

16:16educating. So we have a team that we call forward deployed experts, okay, that really comes alongside

16:24our customers and helps them drive through some of that change and that change management and putting

16:30blueprints in place that allow them to get the benefits and reap the benefits of this really powerful

16:37technology called AI. So that's kind of broadly. Internally, I think as a leader, you have to be

16:44really bold and extremely clear on the standards that you have for your organization. And we had a board

16:52meeting this week and, you know, we've been very fortunate and the progress we've made over the last

16:5918 months has been the best we've ever had as a company. And they said, you know, what's different

17:05about it now? And I said, I think it was ultimately realizing that we had to be extremely clear on

17:15the

17:16type of organization that we believe we need to become to serve our customers and add value to them

17:21so that we're relevant in the future. Because if our customers aren't winning, we're not going to win.

17:25And then drawing out what success looks like, right? Meaning if you don't have a growth mindset,

17:32if you're not evolving and learning and elevating in your individual role and your team's not doing

17:37that, you can't possibly continue to keep pace. And so the speed and the pace of competition for every

17:44role is the highest it's ever been and for every business. And so we have that mentality just driven

17:51into the organization consistently with my leaders. And trust me, we're not perfect. We have plenty of

17:57resistance in places where people are like, well, I've done it this way. I've built products. I've

18:03coded this way for 20 years. And this feels like, you know, super unnatural. And, you know, I just go

18:12back to, I showed this slide at your summit to where you have a plow horse and a person plowing

18:22a field.

18:22And then you have a John Deere tractor. And you're literally the, the, the analogy is ultimately,

18:31if you don't really dramatically change how you're doing things or start pushing that direction,

18:37you're going to be the farmer sitting there watching the guy with the tractor and you're going

18:42to be irrelevant. And I think it's not popular to speak that way, but I just think it's the times

18:50warrants that level of boldness. So I think that's so good. I also feel like one, one thing you talked

18:57about and, you know, measuring outcomes, but also you said, you know, the real metric for you and

19:03maybe for the lenders is the customer lifetime value, right? But, and here's the phrase that stuck

19:10with me, turning relationships into appreciating assets. And if you, if you talk about that, then even

19:16the person who's, who's on a call center, is your job to make X number of calls, is that what

19:22you're

19:22actually being, you know, measured on maybe at some, you know, to some degree, but like the larger goal

19:28now is relationships. And that's just been something really hard for our industry. It just has.

19:32It has been. If you look at the retention numbers and probably, I'm probably in 30 hours of conversations

19:40a week with leaders at organizations talking about that customer lifetime value. How do we unlock it?

19:48How do we create more lifetime value around the customer? Because everybody recognizes whether

19:54you're a bank or IMB or credit union, everybody recognized the most important thing in your

20:00business is the relationship you have with your customer. And everything about our industry

20:06for decades has been, Hey, I'm in a rate cycle, transaction, fulfillment, transaction, transaction,

20:14transaction. And, but if you're playing the bigger game, it's how do I be there for this customer

20:23at different financial moments forever and how that compounds, right? Imagine if you're an organization

20:31that never lost a customer and then continuously found ways to deliver more value to that customer,

20:39how that would compound. And, uh, the cool part now is I don't simply have to rely on kind of

20:48legacy

20:48systems and best practices to fully do that. It's, it's much faster, easier, and you have infinite

20:55more ways to where I can kind of reimagine that customer journey from that lens. And, uh, that,

21:02that's, I think where everybody is striving to, to go in, in, in their organization. How do I build a

21:08customer for life company? And, um, you know, that's, that's our mission, right? It has been our

21:14mission for a long time is like, how do we enable lenders to be customer for life organizations?

21:18And again, to your point now, now that seems possible in a way that it did not before,

21:23because we're not, we're not relying on people to be perfect and do what they, you know, don't want

21:29to do. Yeah. It's just sort of, you, you can elevate, you can take the, before our limitation

21:35was always the lowest common denominator of human behavior, right? And people get busy and it's

21:40natural, right? If you think about it, it's not being critical, but it's natural. If I think about

21:44a sales organization that serves consumers, right? Well, what are they going to focus on every day?

21:50Are they going to focus on the deal that showed up right in front of them, or are they going

21:54to

21:54focus on making sure they're communicating and adding some value to somebody that might not be

21:59in the market or might not have a need for a year or two years, three years? Now I can

22:04do both things.

22:06And, uh, that's a incredibly compelling and powerful value proposition.

22:11Joe, thank you so much for being on today. So fun to talk to you as always. Thank you for

22:15being at the

22:15AI Summit. Um, like I said, really appreciated your session and just love hearing what you guys are

22:21doing. Well, thank you. And thank you to you and the whole housing lawyer crew. You guys do an

22:25incredible job and, uh, just a, a bright spot for our industry and you guys keep up the great work

22:30as

22:30well. We will appreciate you.

Category

Transcript

Comments

Recommended