Mortgage is often the largest financial transaction in a person’s life, yet much of the process still runs on outdated workflows, long waits, and paperwork heavy systems.

Diane Yu, cofounder and CEO of TidalWave, explains how her team is rethinking mortgage technology with a twenty four seven AI loan assistant built for real work, not just demos. She shares why agentic software in financial services needs auditability, domain knowledge, and a different mindset around human oversight.

This episode is a sharp look at what AI adoption looks like inside mature industries where trust cannot be assumed and mistakes carry real consequences.

Key Takeaways

• AI in regulated industries cannot just be a generic model wrapper. It has to understand the domain, the rules, and the workflow deeply enough to operate safely.

• Diane makes a useful distinction between human in the loop and human on the side. The goal is not to remove people, but to let AI do the busywork while humans review, guide, and make judgment calls.

• Transparency is the foundation of trust. In mortgage, that means logging interactions, making AI recommendations visible, and giving loan officers enough context to validate the work.

• Productivity gains matter most when they free professionals from repetitive tasks and give them more time for borrower relationships, sales, and higher judgment work.

• AI native companies also have to use AI internally. Diane explains how TidalWave uses AI to move faster as a small engineering team and release product updates at a pace larger competitors may struggle to match.

Timestamped Highlights

00:33 Why mortgage is still stuck in outdated technology, and how TidalWave is building an AI loan assistant for the industry

01:55 Why incremental tools are not enough to fix a process that takes weeks, hundreds of pages, and still loses money per loan

03:46 The shift from workflow software to a system of action where AI does the work and prepares it for human review

05:53 Why regulated industries create a high bar for AI, including TidalWave’s mortgage compliance benchmark work with Columbia University

08:16 How trust is built through transparency, audit logs, human review, and clear boundaries on what AI should and should not answer

12:33 How AI can give mortgage professionals more time for human judgment, borrower relationships, and higher value work

22:12 How TidalWave monitors new AI models and uses AI internally to accelerate engineering speed

A Line That Sticks

“Human connection is what AI cannot replace.”

Pro Tips

• Do not treat AI as a feature button. Build it into the flow of work so it can actually remove friction.

• In regulated markets, design for auditability from the start. Every interaction, recommendation, and handoff needs to be visible.

• Use AI to improve throughput, but keep humans focused on judgment, trust, and relationship building.

• Watch model development closely, but build your platform so you can evaluate and plug in the best models over time.

Call to Action

Follow The Tech Trek for more conversations with the builders, operators, and technical leaders shaping how AI is changing real industries. If this episode gave you a useful way to think about agentic AI, share it with someone working through similar questions.

AI Is Rebuilding Mortgage From the Inside Out