By Pete Karns, Chief Product Officer, Total Expert
AI is no longer a future state—it’s already here, embedded in everything from ride-sharing apps and food service to factories and farms. In the world of financial services, though, this ubiquity comes with pressure to integrate AI fast, appear innovative, and keep up with competitors—all while being mindful of evolving federal and state compliance requirements. Moving fast without a plan or awareness of up and downstream implications often leads to AI-enabled solutions that either underdeliver or don’t deliver at all.
At Total Expert, we’ve taken a different path: thoughtful integration over flashy announcements. As more financial institutions wrestle with what “real AI adoption” should look like, here’s what we’ve learned and what lenders need to consider to get it right.
Where enterprise AI goes wrong
Too many financial services leaders have experienced what I call “AI failure to launch (and scale).” They’ve rushed to try unintegrated AI-enable offerings and bolt on AI tools—often generalist chatbots, white-labeled versions of generative tools, and/or hooking up to MCP servers—without a clear sense of how these tools will solve their business problems or add potential risk. The result? The occasional value-add result. However, what we see more is poor user adoption, wasted spend, and limited impact.
This is the same trap we saw with “digital transformation” a decade ago, or the original horizontal SaaS applications that evolved or were replaced by vertical-specific solutions. AI-enabled solutions offer tremendous, generational promise but they risk becoming vanity-first, value-later tools. We are focused on the former.
AI that thinks and adapts: Welcome to agentic AI
Let’s make one thing clear: not all AI is created equal.
Chatbots have been commonplace in financial services for a decade now, but remain rigid, rule-based tools that handle repetitive tasks. I’ve worked with “AI” services for more than 15 years and each had their own place and potential when used properly. Herein lies the opportunity. Modern lenders that are focused on retaining and growing their customers in an ultra-competitive market need something more dynamic. Enter AI agents that can understand context, adapt on the fly, and speak in a human-like way. These agents are coachable, brand-aware, and learn from every interaction. They don’t follow scripts—they think in real time. And when built correctly, they become a seamless part of your customer experience.
This is the evolution from AI as a support function to AI as a trusted team member.
Total Expert recently launched an AI Sales Assistant that puts this principle into action. It functions as a scalable, intelligent teammate—able to engage leads, deliver personalized conversations, and identify high-potential opportunities—all while staying aligned with your brand voice and compliance requirements. It’s not a chatbot bolted onto a CRM—it’s a fully integrated AI-enabled solution, utilizing data, embedding within workflow orchestration, and playing nice with application logic because it has the necessary context to work within your lending ecosystem.
The real “why” behind AI adoption
Before choosing any AI solution, or any technology solution, financial services firms must ask themselves: What business problem are we solving?
For example, when mortgage rates dropped for a few weeks in September 2024, our customer intelligence capabilities identified nearly $2 billion in immediate refinance opportunities. But no team of loan officers could scale quickly enough to reach every qualified lead. That’s where AI tools prove invaluable—automating first-touch outreach at scale, surfacing the best opportunities, and empowering human teams to scale up execution to drive retention and growth.
Why embedded beats bolted-on
The types of AI-enabled solutions we are talking about can’t function effectively in isolation. Without access to timely and accurate customer data, and invoked within a specific workflow process, it can’t personalize interactions, anticipate needs, or drive conversions at the right time.
Picture an AI assistant offering a refinance to a customer, only to stall when asked for more details. If it doesn’t know the customer’s current rate or financial profile, the experience feels hollow. That’s not just ineffective—it damages trust.
By contrast, when AI-enabled solutions are embedded within a unified customer experience platform like Total Expert, it draws on a 360-degree view of the customer. It knows the data, understands the history, and delivers contextually rich conversations that convert.
This is why we’re designing our AI capabilities with a focus on the unique needs of financial services organizations. The same purpose-built approach has earned the Total Expert platform its unmatched reputation for usability and time to value.
Generalist AI offerings can be a gamble that increase costs—and time to value
Implementing AI that’s not purpose-built for financial services introduces two major risks:
1. Usability failure: Your team must spend months customizing and configuring a generalist AI tool to make it work for your specific needs—if it will ever work at all. For example, imagine you’re a loan officer and one of your referral partners introduces you to a borrower. Now, you have to choose the best way to approach the first conversation with this borrower. There are countless permutations of questions and answers which all require deep personalization, compliance awareness, and consistent representation of the sales processes and brand tone of the lender. Generalist AIs will quickly reach their limitations in these complex use cases.
An industry-focused AI offering will be trained on this specific use case and provided with the context needed to hold a dynamic conversation with the borrower. This type of AI learns and adapts with each interaction, performing the most time-consuming tasks so you don’t have to.
2. Compliance risk: Without built-in industry guardrails, you’re gambling with regulatory violations and brand safety. As we know, the compliance landscape for financial services is broad and evolving at the federal and state level. Look for AI offerings that are regulatory aware and enable you to configure them based on your organization’s risk tolerance and interpretations.
Lenders don’t need more tools—they need the right tools—ones that work out of the box, understand industry nuances, and deliver immediate, compliant value.
Ask these questions before you commit to an AI offering
To maximize the probability of success, here’s a quick checklist for vetting solutions:
- Can it solve a real, high-value business problem, and how? Review specific examples and ask to speak with other organizations that have implemented the tool.
- Does it function as a true AI agent, not a static bot?
- Can it be deeply integrated into your core system(s), workflow orchestration, and data?
- Does it include financial industry compliance and brand guardrails?
- Can it scale without sacrificing quality or regulatory integrity?
Building the future with purpose-built AI
Total Expert has always designed technology with financial services in mind, and our approach to utilizing AI is no different. We’re not chasing hype. We’re solving problems.
Our focus on AI isn’t simply building standalone features—it’s about embedded, intelligent, and deeply integrated AI solutions. It’s helping lenders scale smarter, engage more meaningfully, and turn data into action. Our AI Sales Assistant is just the beginning—an example of how purpose-built, AI-enabled solutions can solve real problems and deliver tangible value. We are already testing and exploring other AI-enabled solutions and I could not be more excited about the current and potential value our clients and our market will achieve.
Because when AI works, it’s not just impressive—it’s indispensable.
