Editor’s note: This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
Jonathan Delozier: Over the past year, what technology investments actually delivered day-to-day results rather than hype? What’s proven most useful to you and your clients?
Marty Frame: For us, the biggest bang for the buck and the biggest ongoing opportunity has been around using AI to automate what I sort of think of as moments in our production process, whether that’s escrow or title. I call them moments just because they’re little tasks, they’re big tasks, they’re processes. But these opportunities abound in a title and escrow production operation.
Over the last couple years, we’ve introduced AI into our open order process. So we open 100% of our orders with AI, which means we open orders twice as fast as we used to. We handle all of our closing packages on the escrow side using AI — about 30 minutes savings per package, per side. Multiply that out and it becomes really significant.
We handle all of our closing disclosures (CDs) — ingestion, transcription, all of that — with AI, which saves about 10 minutes. And at the closing table, 10 minutes counts, especially when there are successive iterations of a CD.
JD: Beyond production efficiency, what other areas have benefited from these investments?
MF: We’re getting into projects around post-close (quality control), running through files, checking for signatures. You can extrapolate how many places that can go — pages stacked in order, documents in the right order, signatures matching.
We’re starting to look at wire approvals, looking at wire fraud, comparing documents around wire submissions, signatures — all of that. We’ve also built an AI email handler, because in a title and escrow shop, email is basically the communication medium with clients, processors, funders and Realtors.”
This year, we brought Gemini into our DecisionPoint product. We process certain transactions hands free, with zero transcription errors, zero input errors, just because the machine doesn’t make mistakes. So it’s pretty cool.”
JD: Ryan, how does this extend to WFG’s agency partners?
Ryan Ozonian: In 2025, we’ve had a focus on outward-facing AI solutions, especially on the agency side. We built a small team called ATS — AI Automations, Technology and Solutions — where we work directly with our top agents and build a playbook with them.
We’re consulting them on where they can utilize different types of AI to enhance their businesses. A lot of the patterns surround intelligent document processing, removing cumbersome manual labor so staff can be more efficient — not removed — but happier in what they’re doing.
Our agents have been pretty impressed with what we’re able to offer them. We’re formalizing that playbook now so it can be utilized more industrywide, not just among our top agents.
Policy typing is a big one. A lot of agencies still have typists in the office. Something as simple as that — AI tools can help get rid of that, per se, and then those individuals can be utilized in other areas where they’re needed.
JD: What are you seeing this year with remote online notarization (RON) and e-closings? Is the process getting smoother?
MF: Operationally, it’s very smooth. COVID cleared a lot of the cobwebs off the operational obstacles. The biggest remaining one is lender acceptance.
From a state regulatory perspective, we’ve come a long way. We know how to do this in any state, under any set of conditions. RON volume grows incrementally, but one of the biggest drivers right now is fraud.
With RON, you have that built-in identity verification experience. It’s an essential part of the product. We gravitate toward pushing RON in high-risk scenarios.
JD: How do you convince homeowners and agents that remote closings can actually be safer in high-risk situations?
MF: A lot of that comes down to what closers are pushing and how they talk about keeping the transaction safe. We’re not saying in-person closings are unsafe — let’s be clear about that — but there’s an extra layer of verification built into RON.”
JD: Looking ahead, what technology will have the biggest impacts on cost reduction, cycle times and risk mitigation?
MF: “We’re going to continue iterating on these little moments — opening orders, handling packages, (Office of Foreign Assets Control) checks, bankruptcies, pulling legal vesting, title priors. There are many dozens of opportunities in the production process that lend themselves to document-model AI efficiencies.”
Moving beyond grading the file and extracting content to actually making the decision is the next frontier. We’ll be in that space through our AI engine and DecisionPoint in 2026, and that can be very consequential.
RO: We want to educate external parties — agents, Realtors — on how to use agentic AI at the smallest level in the daily routine and then grow from there. We want to be leaders and educators in this space, ready to help the industry in any way possible.
