Dan Vasquez’s rise to leading Rocket Mortgage’s artificial intelligence (AI) future began when David Vasquez, his uncle and mentor, flipped from being a CPA and turned his computer programming hobby into a full-time job.
At the time, Vasquez was 12 years old and was spending a lot of time with his uncle, who lived two blocks away.
“If you needed something that had to do with the computer in the 1990s, and you were a small business, you called my uncle,” Vasquez recalls. “He was a one-man consulting business. He was one of the early work-from-home folks.”
Vasquez was in middle school when his uncle proposed paying him one summer to come to his home office and learn the latest technology programing.
“I’m too busy to sit down and learn this stuff, but you’re young and you seem to have a passion for this,” he remembers his uncle saying. “You learn this stuff and teach it to me, and if you hit certain milestones, I’ll cut (you a) check and that could be your summer job.
“That was my very first paycheck, the very first thing somebody paid me to do,” Vasquez recalls with an air of wonder.
Over the following summers, his work with his uncle evolved to where he went out on jobs with him and handled low-level tasks. Through his later years in high school and into college, he says he was almost partners with his uncle.
“I think that really taught me a lot, growing up in an environment where you were accountable and you were responsible for the entire solution with the client,” he says.
Vasquez joined Quicken Loans, the predecessor of Rocket Mortgage, in 2013. Since then, he’s led teams that have developed some of the company’s most transformational products.
He was the software architect on the companywide team that built and launched Rocket Mortgage, unveiling the company’s digital automated mortgage application process with a Super Bowl commercial in 2017.
He’s especially proud of his lead role developing True Rocket, a program that changed the company’s login and account systems, making them more secure and customer-friendly, with a single signup across all the different Rocket properties.
“It really moved the business forward technologically so we could get to where we are now,” he says.
Vasquez says the goal of AI is to bring Rocket’s experience to clients in the best possible way, wherever they are.
“We’re currently using AI mostly to assist our team members (and) help them focus on our clients,” he says. “As a philosophy, we want to let the machines do what the machines are good at, so the humans can do what the humans are good at doing.”
The post 30 In Their Thirties: Dan Vasquez, AI Strategy Lead, Rocket Mortgage, Detroit appeared first on DBusiness Magazine .
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