Herman Verdoodt, 57, lives in Leuven in Belgium and works at mortgage underwriter Creafin.
He's a long-suffering supporter of the national football team and recently welcomed his third grandchild. He has also recently lent his name to a new AI agent created by Belgian company Oper.
"I'm not at all tech-y — I'm a credit technician — but it was a lovely surprise," says Verdoodt.
"Sometimes my colleagues call me the 'real Herman' now. The real one drinks much more coffee than the artificial one."
Herman AI, which is used by customers for checking data, now helps Creafin handle about €500m worth of business a year.
Oper CEO Geert Van Kerckhoven says credit analysis was ripe for AI because "it's not a very sexy job", and comes buried in paperwork. Asked what moved him to name the system after Herman, he said: "Nobody forgets a nice Herman."
Verdoodt says it's getting harder to hire people like him. Three of the ten people on his team are over 60, and may be difficult to replace, he adds.
"It's a job with a lot of admin and data requests. Imagine you're a cook and the cooking is only 15-20% of your time — it's a bit like that for us. We're always checking or correcting data more than we're doing actual mortgages."
It's not unusual to sink hours into an evaluation only to discover a showstopping data error. "It just happened last week," Verdoodt tells Sifted. Herman AI handles that work in minutes.
‘I'm too old to have this illusion that I'll work less because of the AI’
Does having an AI named after him make Verdoodt philosophical about his work?
"I'm too old to have this illusion that I'll work less because of the AI," he says. "It will give us the opportunity to respond faster to clients. And when you respond faster, you receive more loan requests, so your days will be as long as before."
When Verdoodt began his career around 1990, he recalls everything was manual. "Buying a house is the most important financial decision in your life. Here, the system does it in 5-10 minutes. It checks each part and flags whether there's a problem or a solution."
The human will always need to be there, he says. "Our clients are humans. The final judgment must be taken by another human — it's too important. You're not buying a concert ticket, it's a house. It's €320k or more, and it takes 25 years to repay."
And he feels he may even outlast the artificial Herman.
"Normally I'll end my career at 63. I'm sure that by then Herman will be replaced by another system. It won't be the end of evolution. In 50 years, they'll laugh at the tech we're using today."
