Episode summary
Why AI-ready data is the real competitive edge in housing
HousingWire Daily
· · Hosts: Allison LaForgia · Guests: Amy Gromowski
Summary
Amy Gromowski argues that AI in housing is being held back less by ambition than by the quality and structure of the underlying data. She says the practical path to being “AI-first” starts with short-term productivity gains, then moves to streamlined workflows and, eventually, reimagined mortgage and real estate experiences.
A major obstacle is the complexity of making natural-language data access work across many personas and data domains. Gromowski points to Totality’s scale — 16 petabytes of data, 5.5 billion records, and 38 billion square meters of processed U.S. aerial imagery — and says a query can require stitching together location, valuation, and hazard-risk data before returning a trustworthy answer. To meet that need, she says the company is shifting from FTP, APIs, and dashboards toward AI-ready data, MCP servers, semantic layers, and knowledge graphs.
Gromowski also emphasizes that adoption depends on trust. She says consumer willingness to trust AI in home buying fell from 33% to 16% in less than a year, which makes transparency, explainability, and responsible AI governance essential. In her view, AI should remove administrative friction so people can focus on the relationship-driven parts of the transaction.
Key takeaways
- Gromowski says the AI path in mortgage should start with individual productivity, then move toward workflow automation and only later to full reimagining of the industry.
- She says Totality’s challenge is not just scale but query complexity across valuation, geography, and hazard-risk data.
- Gromowski says the company is moving toward AI-ready data and MCP servers so customers can use natural language across its data assets.
- She says trust in AI during home buying fell from 33% to 16% in less than a year, making transparency a core requirement.
- Gromowski argues AI should handle administrative work, while people handle relationship-driven guidance and high-stakes decisions.
Notable quotes
“AI has opened up a world of possibilities for everything we do, right”
“we need to take this in, you know, smaller increments and really get to a place where we have our own understanding of what's possible and how to get there”
“natural language and AI just it changes the game, right? the way that we have interacted with with data and analytics has been either through UIs or APIs or bulk data transfers”
“AI ready data is these companion files that you deliver along with both data that gives the instructions in how to read our data through natural language”
“the question around trust in AI in the home buying process, went from one in three people, so 33% said, "Yeah, I would trust AI in the home buying process to 16%”
How the episode opens
I'm Allison Leforja and for this conversation I'm joined by Amy Gowski, the VP and head of data science at Totality. — Thank you for having me. — Thank you for joining me. So Amy, to jump right into the deep end, we hear the term AI ready thrown around a lot in the mortgage space,
But many in our audience are still struggling with silos. — How do all of the players in the built environment move the industry forward to be AI first?
So AI has opened up a world of possibilities for everything we do, right? I use it for legal research, medical research. We know there's a ton of value in individual productivity.
Maybe you're using it to develop, you know, the outline of a paper you're writing or an article, whatever that is. There's a individual personal productivity play. And then now we're in already the area era where there's one company I think maybe there's more now but the last I saw our first billion dollar revenue company with two people right so the opportunity for AI is small and it's large so I think that that leaves us all feeling a little bit like where do we start there's a shortterm from where I sit there's a shortterm uh play and there's a long-term play and if we just start focusing on the shortterm play um you know focusing on individual productivity within a company uh within whatever it is that you're trying to do.
Get familiar with the AI and then move to um enhancing and starting to streamline some of the existing work that you do. Maybe it's through partnerships. Maybe it's through your own AI capabilities such as enhancing user experience and enhancing enhancing customer experience using AI um and large language models all the way to this idea that we can reimagine mortgage.
From the episode’s captions: roughly the first two minutes, lightly cleaned. Keep watching on YouTube →
Topics
- ai in mortgage
- ai-ready data
- data infrastructure
- mortgage tech
- housing real estate data
Companies and tickers mentioned
- Cotality
Watch the episode
Watch “Why AI-ready data is the real competitive edge in housing” on YouTube
Summary, takeaways and quote selection by Octagon. Quotes are short excerpts; the full conversation is in the episode.
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