WHY WON'T MY LOAN OFFICERS USE THE AI TOOL WE BOUGHT Every conversation about AI adoption among loan officers eventually arrives at the same complaint. The platform works, the rollout happened, and the login numbers are flat. Lindsey Ricciardelli has a version of that story with a phone call in it. She had spent almost two years on the platform. The friction was designed out, the assistant worked, and compliance had signed it off. She switched it on for every loan officer, sent an email explaining what it was, and waited. Then her phone rang. A producer wanted to know who Casey was, and why she was calling his leads. Casey is an AI assistant. When a borrower's credit gets pulled, or the data shows a refinance opportunity, Casey calls them, and when they are ready she transfers them straight to the loan officer's cellphone. The loan officer on the phone to Lindsey had not read the launch email. Neither, it turned out, had almost anyone else. That call is the reason this episode exists. Adoption is usually handed to training: book the session, take the attendance, report the completion rate. Lindsey's argument, made on the HousingWire AI Summit stage in Dallas in August, is that training is the wrong department to hand it to. Getting a salesforce onto a new platform is a design problem first and a marketing problem second. What follows is what she built, what she left out, where the resistance came from, and why she still has no adoption number to show you. DESIGN THE FRICTION OUT BEFORE YOU MARKET ANYTHING The order matters, and she is direct about it: you cannot market your way past a design flaw. Before any campaign ran, the person building the platform spent months removing the reason a loan officer would bounce off it. The specific decision worth copying is what he did about prompting. The industry's answer to a salesforce that cannot get useful output from a model is to teach prompting, which means a course, a deck and a Saturday. Lindsey's team went the other way and pre-loaded the prompts a loan officer would actually need, so the interface became a plain-language question. You ask it the way you would ask a colleague, and the output arrives already shaped, because the work sits behind the box rather than in front of it. It helped that the engineer had been a loan officer himself and knew which questions were real. The word she uses for the target is one she brought from agency work rather than from software. In advertising, the aha moment is the point where a customer insight lands and the consumer goes "oh, I get it" with a small laugh. That is the thing being engineered. Not comprehension, not competence, recognition. Her claim is that a rollout succeeds or fails on whether a person reaches that moment on their own inside the first minute, and that everything upstream of it is design work. WHY AI ADOPTION FOR LOAN OFFICERS IS A MARKETING JOB Once the platform stopped being the obstacle, the obstacle was attention. Loan officers are inundated, and Lindsey's assessment of internal email is blunt: people do not read it, including when a marketer wrote it. That is not a communications failure to be fixed with a better subject line. It is a channel that does not work, and the campaign has to move. So it moved to where the salesforce already was. Her team had spent years building an audience of loan officers who follow the company online, and the platform messaging went out through that channel instead of the inbox. Alongside it ran the mechanics any marketer would recognise: testimonials solicited from producers, a gift card for the trouble, and success stories pushed out repeatedly rather than announced once. A top producer who built something over a weekend was put on stage at the sales rally, and it was among the best-rated sessions they ran, because the person demonstrating it closed loans for a living. The most-quoted piece of evidence in her HousingWire talk was a loan officer who pulled six refinances in under 24 hours using the platform. She is careful about how that works as a marketing asset: the result is the incentive, and her job was to make sure everyone else heard about it. NAMING THE AGENTS, AND WHAT THEY ARE NOT ALLOWED TO DO The fix for the unread email was not another email. Casey got a face, a voice and a commercial, and a line telling loan officers to save her number because when she calls, money is calling. People started talking about her, which is the point at which an internal launch stops being an announcement and becomes something with a shape people can hold. The compliance work behind it is the part most rollout stories leave out. Casey has been through review and is trained on the fact that she is not a licensed originator: pushed toward anything she cannot answer compliantly, she offers a transfer instead. Lindsey's description of the testing is that they did a lot to try to break her. A loan officer who does not want her can switch her off, and the cadence, the script and the voicemails get reviewed as consumer tolerance shifts. WHAT YOU'LL TAKE AWAY - Prompt training is a symptom. If a salesforce needs a course to get output from your platform, the prompts belong in the platform, not in the curriculum - Internal email is not a channel for a launch. The salesforce already follows the company somewhere else, and that is where the campaign goes - Naming an agent is a positioning decision, not a gimmick. A named colleague lands differently from a new module on a stack people already resent - A rollout two years in can still have no adoption number, and the honest version of that is more useful than a percentage CHAPTERS (00:00) Open (01:14) A month into the merged company (02:22) Two years building the platform (05:13) Design the friction away (08:25) Incentives, testimonials and six refis (10:51) Early adopters and laggards (14:14) Adoption when the salesforce keeps growing (18:47) Casey, and the call she got about her (21:48) What Casey is not allowed to do (24:21) Friction versus value (27:51) The borrower who came back six months later (29:21) What she would do differently MENTIONED IN THIS EPISODE American Pacific Mortgage, the lender where Lindsey now leads marketing and business development Synergy One Lending, where the AI enterprise platform was built with an outside AI partner and which merged into APM in June 2026 Casey, the AI assistant that calls borrowers on a credit-pull or refinance trigger and transfers them to their loan officer Alex, the AI texting assistant that nurtures borrowers who say they are not ready yet Steve Majerus, now president of American Pacific Mortgage HousingWire AI Summit, the Dallas event in August 2026 where Lindsey made the case that adoption is a marketing problem The Mortgage Collaborative, whose event the hosts went to afterwards and whose June survey of lender AI deployment comes up late in the conversation Encompass, the loan origination system whose training session Lindsey watched from the back of the room Claude, which her marketing team uses to build borrower personas out of social posts and Reddit threads ABOUT THE GUEST Lindsey Ricciardelli is SVP of Marketing and Business Development at American Pacific Mortgage, where she supports AI adoption across the salesforce following Synergy One Lending's merger into the company. Her argument, made on the HousingWire AI Summit stage in Dallas this August, is that getting people to use a new platform is a design and marketing problem rather than a training problem: you engineer one moment that lands, instead of scheduling another session nobody attends. LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/lindseyricciardelli-marketingdirector/ Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/lindseyricciardelli/ YOUR HOSTS Chris Grimes is CEO of FundMore. Reuven Gorsht is CEO of Deeded and The Variable. One builds the tool. One absorbs the friction. LISTEN AND SUBSCRIBE Captivate — https://the-signal.captivate.fm/ Apple Podcasts — https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-signal/id6805026259 Spotify — https://open.spotify.com/show/59UmJswLjpRO5p7vUwr7hV YouTube — https://www.youtube.com/@thesignalreuvenchris New episodes every Tuesday.
