Autopilot Update: Meet the First Wave of Customers

Last week, Autopilot became commercially available after 16 weeks and more than 25,500 production loans. Yesterday, we announced that five lenders have expanded their partnerships with Blend to include Autopilot, with more lenders exploring it.

The first wave is not one type of lender. It spans a national fintech lender, two credit unions, a community bank, and a top mortgage servicer. That range matters. An AI agent that holds up across fintech speed, credit union member service, community bank relationships, and servicer scale is a strong signal.

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A few things stand out about this group:

• They tested before they bought: Every one of these lenders made the decision after Autopilot ran on real production loans, not after a demo. The preview period existed so lenders could judge the agent on its actual work, and that is exactly what happened.
• One of them is brand new to Blend: One credit union in the first wave is adopting Autopilot as part of its initial Blend implementation. Autopilot is not just an upgrade for existing customers. It is becoming a reason lenders choose Blend in the first place.
• They are betting on pre-underwriting as the leverage point: During the preview, loans using Autopilot in pre-underwriting moved faster and converted at higher rates than comparable loans following standard workflows. The first wave saw those numbers on their own loans and decided the earliest part of the process is where AI pays off first.

Onity Mortgage: co-building with a trusted AI partner

Onity Mortgage (formerly PHH Mortgage) was working with Autopilot before most of the industry had heard the name. Over the preview period, the team put it to work across its consumer lending operation and watched what it did with real conditions on real files.

“Onity Mortgage has seen consistent impact across all condition types surfacing and clearing conditions faster, resulting in quicker response times.”

Colin Friday
Senior Vice President of Consumer Lending, Onity Mortgage

That is the pre-underwriting story. What comes next is more interesting: Onity is expanding its work with Blend beyond Autopilot itself, using the Blend MCP Server to build new AI-powered customer service experiences on top of verified loan data.

“Onity Mortgage plans to use the MCP Server to power voice agents that can answer routine application-related questions with immediate, purposeful information, 24/7. For customers who prefer to speak with a person, it is about putting the right information in front of our teams the moment they need it. When a customer calls, our people should not have to search across multiple systems for an answer. The AI assistant can surface it for our support staff in real time so they can focus on the conversation and the customer experience.”

Colin Friday
Senior Vice President of Consumer Lending, Onity Mortgage

This is the pattern we hoped to see when we opened the platform. Autopilot does the pre-underwriting work. The MCP Server turns the data it produces into a foundation lenders can build on, for their borrowers and for their own teams.

Why the first wave signed on to Autopilot

Mortgage origination has a timing problem. More than half of borrower activity happens outside 9-to-5 business hours, which means borrowers routinely go a day or more without a response from a loan officer.

Autopilot closes that gap. It reviews documents as they are uploaded, compares them against lending guidelines, identifies missing or inconsistent information, infers GSE-driven qualifying income, and generates contextual follow-up requests while borrowers are still engaged. Issues get resolved during the application, not discovered days later.

The lenders in the first wave did not sign because agentic AI is having a moment. They signed because they watched Autopilot clear conditions on their own loan files for four months and decided they did not want to go back.

Selective Follow-up Mode is now live

Two weeks ago, we gave you a first look at Selective, the follow-up mode lenders asked for during the trial. This week, it graduates from active development: Selective Follow-up Mode is now available in beta and production environments.

A quick refresher on why it exists. Autopilot follows guidelines, which means it sometimes surfaces discrepancies that are technically accurate but too minor or subjective to justify contacting the borrower. Lenders wanted clear, high-confidence requests to go straight to borrowers while judgment calls got a human look first.

Selective does exactly that. It evaluates each potential follow-up and routes it one of two ways: high-confidence requests go directly to the borrower, and lower-confidence ones surface in the loan officer feed as suggestions awaiting approval. Loan officers still see every proposed follow-up, so nothing is lost. The agent does the sorting. The loan officer stays in command.

Selective will also become Autopilot’s default follow-up mode. That reflects how much confidence we have in this balance of automation and judgment, and how consistently lenders told us it is the right one. Lenders who prefer a different configuration can adjust it, but out of the box, Autopilot will now pair speed with a human checkpoint where it counts.

This is also the fastest example yet of the loop we described last week. Lenders surfaced the problem during the trial, we built the fix alongside them, and it is now live for everyone. Contact your account team if you want help tuning Selective for your workflows.

What comes next for Autopilot

Commercial customers change what we ship, not how we ship it. Weekly updates continue, and the roadmap stays organized around the same three priorities: making the agent more dependable, giving lenders greater control, and opening the platform to new AI-powered workflows.

On that last front, upcoming capabilities like Lender Chat will give lenders more ways to build on the same infrastructure Onity is using, whether they want to assist loan officers, automate internal processes, or create new borrower experiences.

The first wave will not be the last. If the preview period taught us anything, it is that the best version of Autopilot gets built alongside the lenders using it.

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Autopilot is now commercially available to Blend customers.

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