Guidance Delivered Differently

I think most of us feel beaten over the head with the topic of AI in every conference, meeting, or blog post. But the way consumers are using AI is telling us about a bigger shift happening, one that exposes a larger symptom of a problem we may be ignoring despite the constant conversation.

I recently spent a week at a philosophy conference, listening to academics and practitioners across fields (medicine, education, sports, finance) circle back to the same conversation we’re all having. AI is reshaping the relationship between consumers and the people who used to hold the information.

As I write this, blurry-eyed and jetlagged, I am more excited than ever to continue what I know feels like an exhausting conversation about the role of AI. But in what I’ve seen in the mortgage industry, it seems we treat AI as a strictly operational story about how to be faster and more convenient. While that’s clearly important, there’s a bigger story at play. The way consumers use AI has created a shift in power dynamics between the expert or institution and the consumer by disseminating the information. 

As Robbie said in our recent Mortgages with Millennials show, the old “gatekeeper” model where the loan officer decided what the borrower needed to know and when, has faded because the information no longer lives only inside the institution. 

We are in the process of moving away from a hierarchical model where the consumer trusts the expert, whether they be a loan officer or a doctor, to be the sole owner of their expertise. The consumer knows there are a variety of sources for expertise and only they completely know their personal situation. We are not yet in this “golden era” of consumer empowerment, however. And I believe it will be a painful process along the path towards what I think will become a changed society around expertise, particularly in the housing industry.

What Distrust Tells Us Today

Distrust is one symptom that arose alongside technology over the past two decades. Trust has declined in institutions year over year, regardless of industry. In the mortgage industry, we’ve seen trust decline in loan officers since I’ve been measuring it in 2021. This year, in our 2026 NextGen Homebuyer Report, we found that only one in eight millennials and Gen Z buyers felt confident they would not be taken advantage of by a loan officer. 

And so as a consumer considers the process of buying a home, they do not immediately reach out to a professional. By the time they show up in your inbox, they have often spent weeks of private research on YouTube, Reddit, AI tools, and dozens of conversations, looking for expertise and validation in a lower-pressure environment where the answer does not influence someone else’s paycheck.

Today, tools like ChatGPT and Claude give them somewhere to ask basic questions without feeling judged, run scenarios without anyone trying to close them, and move at their own pace. This is a fundamental shift away from who holds the expertise and in some ways the power. 

This power shift is revolutionary for consumers who have felt that homeownership and even wealth-building was out of reach for them, or who felt abandoned by leadership and institutions post-financial crisis. However, consumers are also not equipped to sift through the information available. The skepticism and new age of “empowerment” with AI and social media has created a new problem of overwhelm. 

The Shift from Overwhelm to Guidance

Sixty-three percent of NextGen buyers told us they feel overwhelmed by the volume of information about home buying, and 42% of renters are putting off talking to a housing professional because of it. More information has not produced more confident buyers. In a lot of cases, it has produced the opposite.

I struggle with this exact dilemma. I know consumers are under-educated and desire more information, but I also know that more information creates overwhelm and avoidance. I don’t think the answer is to continue gate-keeping, but rather to lean into the flattened power dynamic as a collaborator. 

The next generation of buyers is under-educated but overwhelmed, and they’re skeptical of anyone that tells them they have all the answers. The research tells us this sentiment is only going to continue to grow.

Gatekeeping is out, and AI has killed it. Even if a consumer doesn’t use AI at all, the culture has shifted. We are in a new era of consumer empowerment, and those who know how to show up for consumers in that new dynamic will capture this growing market.