At the Mortgage and Finance Association of Australia's (MFAA) 2025 National Conference this week in Melbourne, Sadish Visvalingam delivered a clear message to the room full of brokers: artificial intelligence isn’t coming for your job. But there are caveats.
"AI is not going to replace humans. But humans with AI will replace humans without AI," Visvalingam, founder of boutique financial firm Premier Financial Advocates, told the crowd.
Many brokers are increasingly anxious about the rise of artificial intelligence, fearing it could render their roles obsolete. Furthermore, the rapid advancement of AI tech has sparked concern that automation might replace the human touch in client relationships and financial decision-making. However, when used strategically, AI isn’t a threat. It’s a powerful tool. By automating repetitive tasks, streamlining compliance and enhancing data analysis, AI can significantly improve broker workflows, allowing them to work faster and freeing up more time for client engagement.
During the MFAA panel, Visvalingam dished out a few practical tips on harnessing AI as a powerful tool in a broker’s arsenal.
"Not all AI works the same way," he said. "AI works as per the rules and regulation and the programming done by the people who created it.
"The future is here," Visvalingam continued. "It's our responsibility to embrace and actually see what we can do about it. My goal is to show you how you can integrate AI into mortgage broker workflow."
Below are a few takeaways.
Visvalingam urged the crowd to properly prime their AI platforms, or train them to understand their specific needs so the technology works for them, not the other way around.
"Priming your AI means you teach your AI about yourself, your business and how you would like the outcomes to be," he said. "But instead of going and giving information to ChatGPT, the way I will find [what I'm looking for] is, I will ask ChatGPT, what is it like to know about myself? [I ask it] could you please help to create a comprehensive questionnaire of what you need to know about myself and my company? We are asking chat GPT to create a document. So the keyword is the document."
Once the initial document is created, Visvalingam recommended copying and pasting the results into a new project. From there, users can fine-tune the instructions to further prime the AI. The goal is to avoid repeating the same prompts with every new session. This way, the AI effectively "learns" what you're looking for and adapts accordingly, saving the broker time in the process.
AI bots have the ability to do a number of tasks, such as pricing, valuation disputes and other admin tasks behind the scenes, Visvalingam said.
"For instance, I have asked my AI agent to go through my Facebook and find all the lenders that will accept directed pages for servicing," he said. "And the best part about AI agents is you can run multiple agents in the background."
Visvalingam took things a step further, inviting the audience to fill out a form on their phones so an AI bot could call them directly and schedule an appointment. He followed up with a live demo on stage.
"The primary objective of this AI agent is to call the clients and book meetings with me," Visvalingam said. "When you have a client making an inquiry on your website, or you put them into your CRM, now you have the ability to trigger an AI agent to call them and book a time with your mortgage broker or yourself. This way you don't need the appointment setters anymore, and it's much easier to use."
Visvalingam emphasized the importance of experimenting with different AI platforms, including ChatGPT, Google Gemini, Copilot and Grok.
"There are so many of them," he said. "Just because you couldn't get a task done through ChatGPT, that doesn't mean you could get it done through Grok [or another platform]."
Visvalingam also recommended using Gamma, an AI-powered presentation tool, as a solution for quickly generating factsheets and spreadsheets.
"Gamma is a great tool for you to use in order to create presentations," he said. "On web pages – you can create documents on social media just from a [query]."
He demonstrated by asking Gamma to generate a factsheet for first-time homebuyers in Australia. The platform responded by suggesting editable topics.
"You select how much information you need on it and what's the type, as well as what type of images you need," Visvalingam said. "Once you do that, you hit general and this will create a factsheet within seconds. And the beauty of these factsheets is, once they're created, you also get the ability to share [the information] with your client. So if you've got a client who is asking a lot of questions, you can create something along these lines – which is a fact sheet – and you can share with your clients. And the good thing about it is, it also has visual aspects of it as well. Pretty straightforward."
