Top U.S. reverse mortgage lenders are entering a new phase in their artificial intelligence (AI) strategy: deploying customer-facing tools to engage more directly with seniors. After achieving operational efficiencies by using AI internally, lenders now plan to roll out chatbots, voice agents and digital prequalification tools to a broader base of borrowers starting in the fourth quarter of 2025. So far, their approach has been incremental — testing new technologies with employees first, then with wholesale and limited partners, and finally opening them up to seniors once feedback loops are in place. “You start internally, like on things that have customer benefit but not direct customer impact, then you learn and expand out your reach,” said Brian Conneen, chief information officer at Finance of America (FOA). At FOA, employees now use a large language model trained on company policies and procedures to answer questions and link back to source documents. That shift has brought “a huge efficiency gain” while reducing escalations to managers, Conneen said. The lender isn’t yet comfortable putting GPT directly in front of customers. Instead, it is piloting AI tools with wholesale partners — considered more sophisticated users — to refine responses and guardrails. “Once we get that feedback, we could expand in a more restricted way to customers asking questions that we would monitor closely, like scripted responses,” Conneen added. Meanwhile, FOA expects to introduce its AI-powered virtual call agent later this year. Seniors will be able to have natural conversations with an AI-powered assistant, which will hand off to a human loan officer if questions become too complex. Longbridge Financial, owned by Ellington Financial, is also developing a voice agent that will allow stakeholders to interact with the company after hours, on weekends and at their convenience for routine tasks. But they will always have the option to connect with a human agent.