AI Essentials with Gary Mauris
DLCG Chairman joins live to deliver a masterclass on AI adoption, brand leverage, and the future of mortgage professionalism.
Session Summary
This was not a typical training session. DLCG Chairman Gary Mauris joined live, transforming what began as an AI Essentials introduction into a strategic directive from the top of Canada’s largest mortgage network. Speaking directly to approximately 100 mortgage professionals, Gary delivered an unscripted masterclass combining AI adoption urgency, practical implementation guidance, and two major strategic initiatives: brand leverage and the mobile mortgage app imperative.
Matthew Dobson led the foundational curriculum — covering top AI models (ChatGPT, Gemini), core concepts of working with AI, what Generative AI is in practical terms, what you can do with AI using the RGI Framework (Retrieve, Generate, Interact), and how to communicate with AI through effective prompting. The session included live demonstrations featuring broker value propositions, DLCG positioning content, and real-time content generation. Vivian Martin showcased the AI Assist integration within Velocity, demonstrating multilingual content generation and workflow embedding.
But it was Gary’s presence that elevated the session. He shared personal habits (95% voice input, zero Google searches in 9 months), real stories (the artist Brian Porter who level up his communication and his commissions using AI), and issued direct challenges: “Saying that I don’t have time to do it is a really, really poor excuse. Commit to it.” He closed with strategic messaging about the “transfer of trust” in client communications and a warning about sending customers “into the Dragon’s Den” when they search for mortgage calculators without your app.
The verdict from participants: 73% said the core concepts “clicked.” The demand for advanced training was clear. This session marked the beginning of a network-wide AI transformation.
Key Takeaways
Live Poll Results
Gary Mauris — Complete Session Commentary
Gary Mauris
Chairman, DLCG (Dominion Lending Centres Group)
Gary Mauris joined this AI Essentials session live, providing real-time coaching, personal anecdotes, and strategic direction to approximately 100 mortgage professionals. What follows is a complete record of Gary’s contributions — every quote, every interaction with Matthew, and every key message — preserved for both human readers and Isaac, the AI Assistant trained on AI Essentials data.
Gary Mauris on Joining the Session
Setting the Tone
“Hey, to my DLCG crew out there, guys, hope you don’t mind, I thought I’d jump on this call. It’s good to see many of you. A lot of you don’t have your cameras on. I’d love to see your smiling mugs. I don’t care about the background or how your hair looks. If you can put on your camera, that would be great.”
“These are really, really cool sessions. They’re really just sort of the ABCs of AI. We’ve tried to be sort of ahead of AI. We’re going to talk today about the integration into Velocity already, which is working incredibly well.”
Gary Mauris on Where to Start with AI
The Foundation
Gary jumped in to provide foundational guidance after Matthew introduced the recommended AI tools.
“The biggest question, and the biggest concern around using AI in your business is that the vast majority, and you guys aren’t alone, but 95% of people in the world still don’t know where to start. They just go, where do I start, right? I’m an old dog, can’t teach an old dog new tricks.”
“So you’re gonna go to your app store, and you’re gonna download at least one of these. I use Google Gemini pretty regularly, and there’s a free version, which is really cool, to all of these — ChatGPT, Google Gemini, Claude, Grok, there’s a lot of different ones. We’ve narrowed it down for simplicity. The two that you should be looking at would be Google Gemini or ChatGPT.“
“Next question is, should I buy the paid version, or should I use the free version? The paid version is a better version. On average, it’s gonna cost you $20 a month, put your credit card in there, and download one of these paid versions.”
“AI will literally change the way you do business today, and we’re gonna walk through some real, simple use cases. But the first thing you should do is go to the App Store, download Google Gemini, and when it asks what version you want, start with the paid version.”
Gary Mauris on How to Learn AI
Ask AI How to Use AI
“I want to be really clear with sort of, like, where you start. The easiest way to learn AI is to ask AI. Once you download Google Gemini, you literally are going to click into the chat bar, and you’re going to go, ‘What is the best and fastest way for me to learn how to use AI in my mortgage business?’ And it’s going to tell you.”
“Most of you, 80% of you, said the biggest impediment to you using AI is the time to learn. Let me assure you, you cannot afford, right, not to learn this. You’re gonna be so far behind, you have to make the time.“
“And how do you make the time? Just download it on your mobile app, on your phone, and play with it every single day. Find, you know, 30 or 40 minutes every day in the evening, in the morning, just to ask it questions, to try different prompts to realize what you can use it for. It does some amazing stuff, but even on the simplest form that we’re talking about today, it involves about you not being afraid of it, making the time to learn it.”
Gary Mauris on Replacing Google Search
The Retrieve Capability
During Matthew’s explanation of the RGI framework, Gary shared his personal experience with AI replacing traditional search.
“I can’t tell you the last time I used Google for a search anymore. If I have a search and I want to know, ‘tell me about John Wright as a mortgage broker in London, Ontario,’ I don’t go to Google anymore, I go to Gemini AI. And it tells me way more information, it formats it, so I very rarely use Google at all anymore. I use AI for everything. I have not been on Google in a search capacity for 8 or 9 months.“
Gary Mauris on Prompting
Keep It Simple
After Matthew explained the goal-context-format-reference-refine prompting formula, Gary jumped in with practical advice.
“So listen, you know, if you get really good at it, if you print out, you know, that text box that says the goal, the context, the format, the reference, the refine, you know, you can put that on your desk and you can use that. But, you know, like, listen, if you don’t, you know, do that every single time, just ask it more questions. Just tell it what you want it to do.“
“Like, you know, I could easily go, ‘Rob Skoko is a mortgage broker at Dominion Lending Centers. Can you tell me everything you know about Rob Skoko, and tell me why you should work with a mortgage professional?’ It’s gonna go, and it’s gonna give you all this information, anything you can find about Rob on the internet right now, then you’re gonna read it, and you’re gonna go, ‘Yeah, that all sounds pretty good.’ You’d go, ‘I’d like to actually have you add in there today whether or not you think my client should take a variable or a fixed rate,’ and you’re gonna press submit, and it’s gonna go, and it’s gonna add that in.”
“Tell them what you’d like it to do. Tell them what you’re using it for. This is going to be an email, this is going to be an SMS, create a PowerPoint, it’s going to be a question and answer document. Just get very comfortable with trying different things, and very quickly, you’ll decide and realize how instrumental this can be in your business. So it doesn’t have to be a perfect science, you don’t have to go, ‘Oh my god, I feel overwhelmed, what is my goal? What is my context? What is my formula? What is my reference?’ Just begin trying different things.”
Gary Mauris on Being Early Adopters
The Reassurance and The Warning
“Listen, there’s gonna be a couple of you on the screen right now that are already experts. What we’re talking about and showing you how to do, you’re looking at me like I’m a dummy. ‘Oh my god, can you give me something a little bit more…’ you know, like, you guys are way ahead, because you’ve been using it for a year, or 6 months, or 3 months.”
“There’s gonna be a lot of you that are gonna go, ‘Wow, this is like rocket science to me. This is like drinking from a fire hose,’ because I haven’t used it.”
“Now, if you hang up and you don’t do anything, and you don’t download this, and you don’t start asking it questions, you will eventually be a late adopter.“
“But right now, you guys are cutting edge. 95% of the world isn’t using this effectively, because quite frankly, they misunderstand it. It is overwhelming to them. So, you know, look at yourself and say, ‘Hey, my company’s turning on my light right now,’ and know that you guys are ahead of 95% of the other mortgage brokers out there doing what you do every single day.”
Gary Mauris on Voice Input
The 95/5 Split
During the email generation demo, Gary revealed his personal AI usage habits.
“Guys, I want to point out one thing right now. He’s not typing, you know, like, 3 or 4 lines of text in front of you and boring you right now. He’s made these example boxes that he’s just cutting and pasting and dropping into the ‘Ask Anything.’ But you literally, like, I never type anything. If you look on ChatGPT, where it says ‘Ask Anything,’ you’ll see the little microphone. Right here. I just click on that microphone, and I just speak into it.”
“Whatever you want it to do, you don’t even have to type it. You can ask the question, it’ll listen to your voice, and then you press the search button, and it comes up with this for you without you having to even do any typing.”
Gary Mauris Tells the Brian Porter Story
The Artist Who Changed His Business with AI
“I’m gonna tell you a really, really quick story right now. I have a friend of mine by the name of Brian Porter. Brian Porter is a very famous artist, right? He does graffiti art, he has his paintings in galleries all over North America. You go to Banff, or you go to Whistler, you go to these high-end galleries.”
“And Brian said to me, ‘Gary, AI has changed my life,’ and I said, ‘How so, Brian?’ And he goes, ‘Well, I’m a grade 9, you know, educated guy. I’m not really, really good at, like, typing, and, you know, my written communication isn’t as good as it should be.’”
“And he goes, ‘But for the last 15 years, I would get, you know, 15 or 20 emails a year, somebody who’d been through one of these galleries, and they would ask me about commissioning a painting, doing a painting for them. And I would respond to them, and I would type them on an email, but it wasn’t formatted properly, but, you know, I don’t know any better. And out of these 15 or 20 emails that I’d get a year, I might get one or two commissions to do art.’”
“‘Now,’ he goes, ‘I get these 15 or 20 emails a year saying that I saw your painting work when I was in Whistler, I’d like to talk to you about painting a piece for me. And I use AI to respond.‘ So he goes, ‘Instantly, for the first time in 15 years, I give them my shipping policy, my return policy, I tell them all about my painting, my history, how many I’ve done, my background. I send him a copy of my contract.’”
“‘They’ve literally changed my life, because I look professional for the first time ever in my life, as good or better than any of my competitors.’ So there’s a really good example of using AI to level the playing field.“
Gary Mauris on Time Savings and Efficiency
Hour of Work in 30 Seconds
After Matthew ran the DLCG value proposition prompt and got comprehensive results.
“So I would go through that, and I’d go, ‘Okay, that’s great. That’s exactly what I want to say. Hey, my company is part of DLCG, right? Dominion Lending Centers, Mortgage Center, Mortgage Architects. We originate more loans in Canada than any other Canadian bank. Last year, we funded $67 billion in mortgage business. Here’s all the reasons why you should use us.’”
“They don’t want to read it, because you might go on there, ‘Okay, well, you know, they don’t need, you know, I don’t need to tell them about this,’ you can omit anything you don’t want. But, you know, it is so valuable for positioning yourself when having communications with your clients. It separates you from everybody else who isn’t using it, and makes you look much more professional and more relevant with information that’s meaningful to them.“
Gary Mauris on Velocity AI Integration
AI Assist Built In
“Sure, yeah, so guys, here’s what I promise you. We’re always early adopters and all this sort of stuff, we have to be. You know, as I said, you guys are also early adopters on this, don’t kid yourself. But we already have AI Assist integrated into Velocity.“
“So, Vivian’s gonna walk you through some use cases, show you a quick video. By the way, Viv, I don’t love that video, it’s really hard to read, and to look at, so we have to, you know, improve that. But, we already have it integrated right into Velocity, so a lot of the things, a lot of the notes that you want to write, lender notes, email responses to your customers, are already embedded inside of Velocity.”
“If anybody has any questions, they can just call the Velocity directly, or they can call, you know, Velocity head office staff, where they can call their network support, Heather, or Jody, or whatever, to help them walk through this, correct?”
Gary Mauris on Leveraging Your Brand
Strategic Initiative #1: The Transfer of Trust
Gary’s closing remarks began with strategic messaging about brand leverage — one of two major initiatives he emphasized.
“Yeah, hey, listen guys, the last thing I’ll leave you with is just a couple more minutes. I don’t get a chance to get in front of a lot of you very often, especially, you know, at fairly large numbers here. Two things I wanna talk to you about.”
“So, A, really happy to sort of launch some of these AI Essentials calls for you. We think we’re early, very early days. We are going to build an advanced course as well, but this is a really good start.”
“What I mean by that is, you’ll never hear me ever say, you know, you shouldn’t feature your name, your picture, your office, really prominent on any of your outreach, any of your marketing, any of your social media. I want you to do that. But I will tell you that brands drive behavior.“
“On every single situation, every single one of you should be saying, ‘My name is Gary Morris, I’m with Mortgage Center, I’m with The Better Way, I’m with Mortgage Architects, right? But I also wanted to let you know that Mortgage Architects is part of the DLCG group of companies.’ And the DLCG group of companies funds more mortgages in Canada, more new mortgages in Canada, than any other Canadian bank, trust company, or credit union. We’re also a publicly traded company on the Toronto Stock Exchange under the stock symbol DLCG.“
“A lot of you have been around for a long time, and we often complain about losing customers, having that first intake call, spending 45 minutes or 25 minutes talking to the customer, maybe taking the application, and then all of a sudden, the customer just stops responding to us. Maybe we eventually get ahold of them, the customer says to us, ‘You know what, we’ve decided to hold off,’ or ‘We just found out my husband might lose his job,’ or ‘We can’t find a house.’”
“So, it’s really important that every single communication you have, whether it’s an email, whether it’s a text message, whether it’s a voice call, you know, when you’re speaking to the customer, that you say to them, ‘Hey, it’s Gary. I’m a mortgage broker, I’m with A Better Way, I’m with Team Borley, I’m with Mortgage Excellence, but I wanted you to know that we’re part of a much bigger organization. We’re part of DLCG.’”
“‘And DLCG is Canada’s largest mortgage company. We originate more mortgage loans in Canada than any other Canadian bank, trust company, or credit union. We’re a publicly traded company, we trade on the Toronto Stock Exchange, here’s our stock symbol, DLCG.‘”
“And why are you doing that? Because you only get one chance to build credibility with the customer. So, you’ll see us, we’ve really been pushing, you know, the leveraging your brand going forward. We’re getting tremendous response by it, we’re seeing a lot less orphan files. So I wanted to kind of leave that with you guys, that you guys should be looking to use that and leveraging the brand in every situation that you get.”
Gary Mauris on the Mobile Mortgage App
Strategic Initiative #2: The Dragon’s Den Warning
“The second piece that I wanted to just, you know, refresh you guys, because I don’t get a chance to get in front of you very often, is your mobile mortgage app.”
“And saying, ‘Listen, we have the number one mortgage mobile app in Canada, it’s got 25,000 Google five-star reviews. I’m gonna email, or I’m gonna text you the link, so you download your mortgage app.’”
“What a lot of mortgage brokers don’t know is that if you don’t provide a mortgage app or mortgage calculators to your customers, then every time they want to run a situation, a scenario, they want to do the math on what their payments look like on a 20-year am, a 25-year am, a 30-year am — what does your customer do?“
“They just go to Google, or AI now, and they search mortgage calculators. There’s more people in North America searching mortgage calculators than they’re searching lowest rate, best mortgage rates, lowest mortgage rates. They actually search mortgage calculators because they want to have access to calculating their mortgage terms and conditions in the evenings, on weekends, maybe, you know, themselves, privately.”
“And if you do not have your customers using your mortgage app, when they search mortgage calculators on Google, what do they get? They get TD, they get Scotia, they get RBC, they get Butler Mortgages, they get Nesto, they get Canwise, they get RateHub. And what happens when they click on one of these competitors’ mortgage calculators? They instantly start retargeting your customers, and they start offering them rate specials, lower rates, unpublished rates.”
“But if you just sent them the link on your mobile mortgage app that we provide all of you free of charge, when they do mortgage calculations, they’re going to be inside of your closed environment. You’re gonna start losing less customers, you’re gonna start having less customers tell you ‘We’re gonna wait, we’re gonna hold off, we’re not gonna move forward right now.’”
“So there’s a couple of really easy pro tips for you that will make a radical difference in your business. The first one is always tell the story, leverage your DLCG brand. It doesn’t matter if you’re at DLC, if you’re at Mortgage Architects, or Mortgage Center Canada. And the second pro tip is download your mortgage app that we provide you. Doesn’t matter what company you’re with, learn to use it yourself, intimately, get really fast and efficient with it, and never talk to a customer again without sending them instructions on how to download your mortgage app, so that they stop going to Google to search mortgage calculators, where you’re sending your customers directly into the hands of all these low-rate providers and all these competitors.”
“Does that make sense to all of you guys? It should.”
Gary Mauris — Final Call to Action
The Close
“Those are the last two things, guys, I wanted to leave you with. I thank you very, very much.”
“The only thing I ask you to do is I ask you to spend the time to learn these tools, right? Saying that I don’t have time to do it is a really, really poor excuse.“
“And in terms of this AI thing, the best way to learn AI is to download it, ask AI the best way you can use it.“
“If you want to send me a message, guys, directly, Gary@DLC, if you want to, you know, if you have anything else that you need from us, please reach out to Matt. Thank you very much. I appreciate you having me on today. To Viv, as always, thank you for the good work that you continue to do.”
“And, congratulations, guys. You’re early adopters. Now use it. Implement it, and get started.“
Key Themes Index
Quick reference for Gary Mauris’s key messages from this session. Each theme links to the corresponding section above.
- AI is just an app — download from app store
- Pay for premium ($20/month)
- ChatGPT or Google Gemini recommended
- 95% of world doesn’t know where to start
- 30-40 minutes every day
- Download on mobile phone
- “You cannot afford not to learn this”
- Ask AI how to use AI
- Gary talks 95%, types 5%
- Use the microphone button
- No typing required
- Faster and more natural
- Don’t overthink the formula
- Just ask more questions
- Context is key — more is better
- Tell it what you’re using it for
- 95% of world not using AI effectively
- You’re ahead of 95% of brokers
- AI won’t replace you — makes job easier
- Do nothing = become late adopter
- Levels the playing field
- Hour of work in 30 seconds
- Look more professional
- Brian Porter: 2 → 15 commissions
- Brands drive behavior
- Always mention DLCG credentials
- Transfer of trust in every communication
- One chance to build credibility
- Never talk to customer without sending app link
- 25,000 five-star Google reviews
- Keeps customers in your environment
- “Dragon’s Den” warning about competitors
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