AI is already operating inside mortgage companies: in LOS and point-of-sale systems, pricing and fraud tools, income and asset verification, document extraction, AVMs, marketing and lead generation, chat and voice systems, servicing workflows, recruiting platforms, copilots, cloud services, and the subprocessors behind all of it. Some of it was deliberately approved. Some is embedded in a familiar product. Some arrived through a release, and some is optional or disabled today and activated tomorrow. The first question is no longer whether your institution plans to use AI; it is whether you can identify where it already operates, what it touches, and what evidence and contractual rights you have on file.
So the centerpiece of this issue is a working tool, not an article: the Phase-One AI Vendor Inventory Letter, released today, ready for your letterhead and every vendor that could conceivably touch AI. A companion evidence package for the vendors is close behind. And because the same discipline decides poaching cases, where the record built in the first seventy-two hours outweighs the story reconstructed after the TRO application, we are featuring my conversation with Greg Sher on recruiting without buying a lawsuit, alongside a California appellate decision every production-channel executive should read.
You will also find our MISMO news and new industry seats, where the team speaks this fall, and what the practice is handling beyond AI. The operating rule for all of it is the same: build the file before you have to defend it. If something in these pages raises a question about your shop, call me directly.
