90% of Title Professionals Already Using AI, Qualia Survey Shows

July 16, 2024

Title and escrow professionals are not sitting on their heels when it comes to engaging with artificial intelligence (AI technology). According to a survey conducted by Qualia, 90% of these professionals have already adopted generative (gen AI) solutions, regardless of whether their respective companies have formally integrated AI into their workflows. The majority (84%) feel neutral, optimistic, or very optimistic about the benefits of AI for the title and escrow industry. Qualia surveyed 378 title and escrow professionals.

The rapid, employee-led adoption of AI tools is promising for its potential to transform title operations in the next few years, Qualia reported. “It signals that AI is ‘sticky,’ meaning employees continually come back to it because it provides tangible value. When support for new technology comes from the bottom-up, leaders can expedite the integration of tailored solutions into the business without facing adoption hurdles,” Qualia said.

Survey results showed the highest-ranked benefits of AI were increased productivity, automating repetitive tasks, and increasing job satisfaction. Meanwhile, the lowest-ranked risk of AI was “losing my job to AI.”

Respondents also acknowledged that the most pressing risks associated with AI will impact the entire industry—not just those companies that adopt AI. The highest-ranked risk associated with AI was “increased or more sophisticated fraud.” This signals that business leaders must, at the very least, understand the basics of AI in order to fortify their businesses against new types of attacks brought on by AI advancements, according to Qualia.

Here are examples of how the title and escrow industries are using gen AI:

  • Reduce tedious tasks and rekeying: Extract unstructured data from documents, such as a purchase and sales contract PDF, and convert it into structured data that can be automatically inserted into fields within an order.
  • Provide timely responses to client questions: Recognize what’s happening in a file and draft an accurate, personalized response to a question sent by a transaction party.
  • Enable more efficient workflows: Interpret information sent from a transaction party and use that information to assign the next relevant task in a workflow.
  • Drive insights: Ingest information from a report or document and provide a high-level summary.
  • Enable deeper research: Take a query from a user and provide a response that goes much deeper than a typical search engine result.
  • Address blank page syndrome: Create the first draft of an email, memo, business brief, or piece of marketing content that can then be edited to fit your brand style and tone.
  • Fraud detection: Identify atypical patterns; for example, two letters switched in an email address, to identify potential fraud.

“Ultimately, AI solutions will create greater operational efficiency and stability, enabling title & escrow companies to adapt to future market fluctuations,” Qualia said in its report. “Over the past few years, the real estate market has shifted from a refi boom to a high-interest, low-volume environment. To keep up with market changes, title & escrow companies had to ramp up staffing, only to cut staff later when volume slowed. As we await the next cycle, now is the time for title & escrow companies to invest in solutions and technology that enable them to scale up and down without falling into hiring and firing cycles that are detrimental to the business.”

Despite the wide adoption of AI, about 94% of those surveyed lack company-wide AI policies in place, showing that most business leaders are taking a “wait-and-see approach,” Qualia reported.

Without an AI policy, Qualia said companies are at risk, including but not limited to:

  • Shadow AI: Employees using unsanctioned and potentially insecure tools without company knowledge can open companies up to security risk and data leaks.
  • Reputational risk: Depending on how the tool is trained, gen AI carries the risk of creating inaccurate or biased content.
  • Inefficiency: When employees adopt their own tools, the company cannot reap the full, transformative AI potential.


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