The Intermediary –- May 2026 - Flipbook - Page 99
T E C H N O L O GY
Opinion
Five cost
questions to ask
an AI provider
M
ost mortgage
professionals
I speak to
about artificial
intelligence (AI)
want to talk about
data and compliance. Very lile is ever
spoken about cost, particularly given
that subscriptions to general purpose
large language models (LLMs), like
ChatGPT, can start from as lile as
£20 a month.
But I have real concerns about
the long-term financial cost of AI
to broker firms. Brokers should be
asking their providers: What is this
product going to cost me, in real
terms? In 18 months or three years
down the line?
The pricing environment for AI is
not stable. Many of the tools being sold
into the broker market are exposed
to that instability in ways customers
don’t realise. Before you sign anything
here are five questions worth asking.
1. Is your AI built in-house, or are
you reselling someone else’s?
Many ‘AI-powered’ tools being
marketed to brokers are running
on general purpose LLMs from
OpenAI, Google or Anthropic,
wrapped in mortgage branding.
That’s not inherently wrong, but
it changes the answer to every
other question on this list. If your
provider is, in effect, a middleman,
you’re paying for that middle
layer and you’re exposed to pricing
decisions made by a company you
have no relationship with.
2. If the underlying model
provider raises its prices,
what happens to mine?
Get the answer in writing. Many
AI service contracts contain clauses
that pass the cost on. Customers
don’t always notice until an invoice
arrives that looks different to
usual. Ask whether upstream price
increases are passed on in full, in
part, or absorbed by the provider.
Then ask what their plan is when,
not if, those increases come. The
major model providers are running
at significant losses, and the
consensus among analysts is that
prices must rise materially before
the economics work.
3. Can you commit to
predictable pricing for
the term of our contract?
A provider with genuine control
over its own AI infrastructure can
give you a straight answer here.
A provider reliant on third-party
general purpose LLMs usually can’t,
and shouldn’t, pretend otherwise.
If the answer is vague, that tells you
something useful about how stable
the cost line is going to be.
4. What happens to my
costs as our usage grows?
Plenty of AI tools are priced per
query or per token, even when the
headline pricing looks like a flat
monthly fee. Ask where the ceiling
is. Ask whether there are usagebased escalators in the contract that
kick in once you cross a threshold.
The trap here is signing at one
volume and discovering the
economics look very different at
three times that volume, by which
point the tool is woven through
your advice journey and you can’t
disentangle yourself.
5. Are you using the right
size of AI for the job?
This one maers more than it
might seem. Most mortgage tasks
do not require the horsepower of
ZAHID BILGRAMI
is CEO at Mortgage Brain
an LLM. They require a focused,
well-designed system built for the
specific job. The analogy I like to
use is running structured mortgage
work through a huge LLM is
equivalent to a jet engine powering
a bicycle: more expensive, oen
less consistent, and wasteful in
ways that get baked into what you
pay every month. A thoughtful
provider will be able to tell you
which tasks use AI, what kind,
and why. A provider who can’t
articulate this is almost certainly
defaulting to the most powerful
model available and you’re paying
for the privilege.
Why this matters
Brokers are managing cost under
particular pressure. Consumer
Duty has raised the bar on
demonstrating fair value. Margins
are tight. Unlike businesses in other
sectors, brokers cannot easily pass
unexpected technology cost increases
through to clients without inviting
regulatory scrutiny.
If a core piece of your advice
technology suddenly costs materially
more, your options are: absorb it,
pass it on, or remove it once it’s
already embedded. None of those
choices will be easy to make
peace with.
The brokers who will be best placed
when the AI pricing environment
shis are the ones treating cost as a
serious procurement question now.
The questions above won’t catch
every risk, but they’ll catch most of
them. They’ll tell you very quickly
whether the provider in front of you
is being straight with you about what
your firm is really signing up to. ●
May 2026 | The Intermediary
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