Live from Las Vegas, HousingWire President Diego Sanchez sat down with Sarvesh Mahesh, CEO of Tavant, to discuss the company's 25-year journey and its latest advancements in AI. Tavant, which spun out from Amazon in 2000, has evolved into a leader in technology solutions for the mortgage industry. Mahesh shared insights on Tavant’s history, its focus on AI-driven innovation, and the future of agentic AI in mortgage lending.
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00:00And we are live from Las Vegas, I'm Diego Sanchez, President of HousingWire, and I'm joined today by Sarvesh Mahesh, the CEO of Tete-Tavant, Sarvesh, it's so great to have you on this interview today.
00:22Thank you. I love to be here.
00:24So, before we dive in, you're celebrating a little bit of an anniversary now. 25 years ago, Tete-Tavant spun out from Amazon. Looking back on that 25 year history, what stands out to you as the highlights?
00:43Yes, 25 years ago, a few of us were at Amazon, and we at that point thought that Amazon is selling everything, eBay was auctioning everything, and our original idea was to rent everything.
00:58So, that was our original thesis, based on which we left Amazon and started Tete-Tavant. However, it was the year 2000, and that's when the dot-com bust happened. A few months after we started, it was very difficult to raise money for any kind of business plan.
01:16But at that point, we were 30 of us, and we realized that while there is no opportunity for another B2C dot-com, there is a lot of opportunity for providing technology to other industries. And there are some basic tenets that we had learned from Amazon.
01:36One was extreme customer focus. The second was the technology can be applied to really make many of the operations very efficient. And the third was value of data, right? Because we had seen, even at that point, Amazon had that feature where, oh, if you bought this, then you might want these. And this was all because they were keeping data on what was being bought.
02:02So, the value of data is something that's been the core value of our company also, and that's how we built our company. So, we started building technology for other companies in the manufacturing industry and mortgage industry, because mortgage industry was booming at that point.
02:25And we built products and services in those two industries so that we could get a product and services flywheel going. Because our products led to our services, and our services led to our product sales. And that also made our products continuously better. So, that's the long story for us.
02:47Amazing. And so, we're entering a little bit of a new era with artificial intelligence. And it's been a big buzzword here in Las Vegas. And I'm excited to talk to you today because you have a little bit of an announcement in addition to this 25 year anniversary.
03:06Yes. So, we are also launching our platform to build agents. And these agents that we are launching are going along with our products. But the platform also allows us to build agents in every other opportunity that we have. So, we are very excited about that. And we've been doing AI for many years now, over a decade, at least analytics for over a decade and AI for over five years.
03:35So, AI has been one of those things where it's happening slowly and then all of a sudden it happens. So, I think it's reached what Michael Gladwell will call a tipping point, where now it's everywhere. And every aspect of a business is getting affected by use of AI.
03:58Yeah, I speak with a lot of lender CEOs as part of my Powerhouse podcast. And over the past six months, it's been amazing to hear how much innovation and progress has happened in such a short time with AI.
04:14Absolutely. And what we see is not only what we are building, but how we are building is getting affected too. So, AI is not only being used in the solutions that we are building, but also how we build software has completely changed. And how we test software has completely changed. How we gather requirements has completely changed.
04:38With the use of Copilot and other tools that are out there today, we are seeing anywhere between 20 to 30% improvement. And this is just the beginning. We know the expectation is that it will become even more efficient to build new software.
04:55So, is there going to be a special team or business group at Tevant that is focused on agentic AI?
05:04Yes. So, we have a group that's building the platform. And that platform will be used by all our different groups to build the agentic AI solutions. And this core group is going to work to make solutions that go along with our products.
05:24And where do you see that team collaborating with your financial services business to build AI-first products for your lending clients?
05:38So, lending, and especially mortgage, is an industry where there's a lot of applicability for AI and agents. The areas where we are using agents first is as a coach for the sales team, where they can become much more efficient, they can do things much more efficiently.
06:01But we are also building agents that make the specific tasks in the whole origination process much more efficient.
06:10Amazing. And so, we're just at the beginning. We've already talked about that. Where do you see this going with this special group at your company and with your clients overall in terms of how the origination process and mortgage might look in a couple of years?
06:31It's hard to sort of predict where any of these things is going to go. But what we see is that more and more processes will get automated and maybe the customers will be able to do it themselves as opposed to having the mortgage company or the origination company do it.
06:53But we see that there will be more and more agents. And as you might have seen, that Satya Nadella has made a prediction that all SaaS software will go away and will all be replaced by agents. While I may or may not believe that, but I do believe that there will be more and more agents working along with your SaaS software that will make the process much more efficient.
07:18Yeah. And one of the things that we think about a lot at HousingWire is, is there a way that we could prevent some of this boom and bust that we see in hiring using agents? What are your thoughts on that?
07:33I think, will it make the booms and busts go away? Probably not. But we'll definitely even out the whole cycle. Because a lot of the work that you need to do, we need to hire a lot of people because a lot of the processes are manual. And you have to find people to do that. It's a lot easier to spin off a new agent than it is to find a new person and hire them and train them.
08:00Right. Well, it has been really interesting catching up with you today. Congratulations on 25 years. And it sounds like with this new AI group, the next 25 years is going to be really, really interesting.
08:15Absolutely. And not just in our financial and mortgage business. No, the AI is affecting all our different verticals. Our service lifecycle management business is getting a lot of new agents in that business too. And so is our agriculture and media businesses.
08:34Amazing. Sarvesh, so great to talk with you today.