With its four largest firms all at least 100 years old, the title insurance industry has a bit of a reputation for being antiquated and technology averse.
“I always joke that we work in an industry that literally researches the past, and because of that, sometimes, I feel like our marketing, sales, and technology live there too,” Sam Trimble, vice president of strategic growth and development at Fidelity National Financial, said.
The title industry has worked hard over the last few years to shed that reputation. It has begun to adopt and integrate more and more technology into the title search and production process. While progress has been made, many in the industry see artificial intelligence (AI) as a way to really catapult the 19th century business into the 21st century and beyond.
“There are tons of operational opportunities using artificial intelligence and large language models and generative AI in title,” Trimble said.
While many in the industry have already explored using generative AI to create marketing collateral and campaigns, Trimble said he and others in the industry are excited about how AI can help with the day-to-day operations of a title company.
According to the State of the Title Industry Report from solutions firm Proplogix, 26% of respondents are looking into or already using AI in their closing workflows.
“When I was a title agent in Texas, there was a team of people opening new orders, verifying information, and sending out documentation that was needed for buyers and sellers,” Trimble said. “Not only did it take a lot of time, but it cost a lot of money. Now a process that could have taken a couple of hours, takes a couple of minutes and it is significantly more accurate without room for human error. It really is limitless.”
Charlotte Brown, the vice president of product at Qualia, shares Trimble’s outlook.
“We’ve seen that generative AI is most effective for tasks that are time consuming to start but easy to double check,” Brown said. “Data extraction from documents is a great application of generative AI. For example, when a title company receives a Purchase & Sale contract via email, AI can help grab key information and queue up a transaction with pre-populated data for review.”
However, Brown said that generative AI tools are still in the early stages of development and their outputs should be double checked for errors, stressing that “accuracy matters in underwriting.”
Additionally, the title industry has long struggled with a talent crunch and an aging workforce (over 40% of State of the Title Industry report respondents were over the age of 55), and some industry professionals believe that AI could help alleviate some of the pain this has created.
“The unsung heroes of title are examiners, processors and receptionists,” Trimble said. “Their jobs are hard and tedious, and AI could help free up some of the time they spend on things like data entry to do tasks better suited for humans.”
Hoyt Mann, the president and co-founder of Alanna.ai, likes to think of AI as an “army of interns.”
“Something we say a lot is let robots do what robots do and let humans do what humans do. If you had this army of interns, you would have them do things like order entry that doesn’t take a lot of industry knowledge to do, so why not allow AI to do it,” Mann said. “It frees up humans to create and continue to establish relationships and deal with the human part of the business, which is so important to smaller title companies. A small company that is able to leverage AI can have a similar type of capabilities as a bigger company.”
While many in title are optimistic about the advances AI could help the industry make, there are certainly some concerns.
“There is a lot of excitement about what you can do with data. I can take my title plant that has 10,000 or 100,000 documents and put it in ChatGPT and create a narrative or summary — there are great potential use cases in our industry,” Genady Vishnevetsky, the chief information security officer at Stewart Title, said. “But one must understand what the implications are — are you doing this in a controlled environment or using a service? Be aware of the data fed to the AI platform and input becomes a property of the service.”
For Vishnevetsky, the biggest concern is data safety.
“Since ChatGPT came out in November of 2022, we saw an evolution and an explosion of anything from the browser plugins that have ChatGPT or AI in them, but the majority of these are third-party services. There are literally dozens of these .Ai domains registered every single day and you really don’t know anything behind them,” Vishnevetsky said. “You might be able to feed information to these services and get results that seem plausible to you, but you really don’t know or understand what is does with your data — is it safe or not safe?”
Vishnevetsky also noted that the constant evolution of large language models means that it may give different answers to the same query depending on the information it has available, creating potential inconsistencies.
While this is of concern to CertifID CEO Tyler Adams, his main source of unease is how fraudsters may utilize AI to make fraud attempts harder to catch.
“A couple of years ago we were able to warn people to look for misspellings or bad grammar in emails and with AI that has just disappeared,” Adams said. “The precision with which emails are getting crafted by criminals is really scary and it is not allowing for business owners to look for what had been standard red flags.”
For Vishnevetsky the application of voice cloning by fraudsters is an even greater source of concern.
“AI allows us to process massive amounts of data and now with just a few seconds of audio and tuning software you can almost get it perfect and that is terrifying,” Vishnevetsky said. “Everything else can be spoofed — your email address, the caller ID of a mobile or a desk phone, but now the voice is also able to be spoofed. So now if you imagine all of this together, I can make a phone call to the CFO posing as the CEO of a company, and my caller ID appears as the CEO and I’m leaving a voicemail in their voice telling them to wire money to the account I’ll send them in an email — it seems very credible.”
Although AI may make fraud attempts harder to detect, Adams is excited about the ways AI could be utilized to help fight these AI powered fraud attempts.
“We are utilizing it to enhance our fraud models,” Adams said. “We collect all these data points to better understand if something is a risky transaction or if somebody has infiltrated a particular deal. Our ability to synthesize this information in real time and evaluate all of those signals becomes a lot better with AI.”
Adams said they are still in the early stages of this, but he is very hopeful that utilizing AI in this way will help keep even more transactions safe from fraud in the future.
Despite the potential data security risks and its usage by bad actors, industry professionals believe AI is here to stay in title.
“I think the amount we use AI might fluctuate but it is definitely here to stay,” Bill Svoboda, the president and co-founder of Close Simple, said.
Svoboda said all of the industry professionals he talks to are already using AI to help with things like proofreading emails, if not finding other ways to integrate AI into other aspects of their business, like creating marketing collateral or streamlining backend operations.
“Our lives can’t go backwards,” Svoboda said. “How much a business leans into AI for things like automations — that is going to be the difference maker. If a company can provide a better customer experience by using AI to free up people to be there for their clients, they are already thinking about how they are going to do that.”
Or as Diane Tomb, the president of the American Land Title Association put it, in a Proplogix report: “No one is going to lose their job to AI, but they are going to lose their job to the people who know how to use AI.”
