The CHAMPtitles Approach to Automation: Why They Don’t Replace Expertise, They Eliminate Busywork

The CHAMPtitles Approach to Automation: Why They Don’t Replace Expertise, They Eliminate Busywork

Automation typically triggers one of two reactions in skilled professionals: enthusiasm about efficiency gains or fear about job security. In the title insurance industry, fear dominated. Title officers had watched technology companies promise to revolutionize their field, only to deliver solutions that either didn’t work or threatened to replace them entirely.

Shane Bigelow faced this skepticism head-on when building CHAMPtitles. But instead of fighting the resistance, he reframed the entire conversation around automation.

In a recent episode of Category Visionaries, Shane McRann Bigelow, CEO of CHAMPtitles, explained how his company won over a wary industry by making a simple promise: we’re not here to replace your expertise—we’re here to eliminate the busywork that prevents you from using it.

Understanding the Resistance

Title professionals’ skepticism toward automation isn’t irrational. Their work carries significant liability. A missed lien or an overlooked easement can result in substantial financial consequences. When software promises to automate this work, the natural question is: will it catch everything a human would catch?

More fundamentally, title officers take pride in their expertise. They’ve spent years learning how to read complex documents, interpret legal language, and identify potential issues. Automation that promises to replace this expertise feels like a threat to their professional identity and livelihood.

CHAMPtitles could have tried to overcome this resistance with promises about AI accuracy or guarantees about maintaining quality. Instead, they chose a different approach: identify the work that didn’t require expertise and automate only that.

Identifying Manual Labor vs. Expertise

Shane’s years running an actual title agency gave him insight into which parts of title work were genuinely complex and which were just tediously repetitive. This distinction became the foundation for CHAMPtitles’ automation philosophy.

“Every single closing that comes through the door requires a search of the public records,” Shane explains. “You have to go find them, pull them back, review them, type findings, type exceptions into a commitment document.” This process consumed hours of time from skilled professionals, but most of it didn’t actually leverage their expertise.

“That type of work is just manual labor,” Shane says. “It doesn’t require an immense amount of subject matter expertise.” Finding documents in public records, pulling them into a system, typing information from one document into another—these tasks are repetitive and time-consuming but don’t require the judgment that makes title officers valuable.

The insight was that title work consisted of two distinct types of activities: mechanical tasks that could be systematized and analytical work that required human judgment. Most automation attempts tried to replace both. CHAMPtitles focused exclusively on the former.

Positioning Automation as Augmentation

This distinction allowed CHAMPtitles to position their platform in a way that reduced rather than amplified concerns. They weren’t building software to replace title officers. They were building tools to free title officers from the repetitive work that prevented them from applying their expertise effectively.

The messaging shift was subtle but powerful. Instead of “our AI can do title searches,” the message became “our automation handles the mechanical work so you can focus on analysis.” Instead of “increase efficiency,” the promise became “spend your time on work that actually requires your expertise.”

This positioning resonated because it aligned with title officers’ own frustrations. Nobody enjoyed spending hours pulling documents from public record systems or typing the same information repeatedly into standardized forms. These tasks were necessary but unfulfilling. Automating them didn’t threaten professional identity—it reinforced it by allowing professionals to focus on work that actually required their skills.

Building Trust Through Transparency

CHAMPtitles reinforced this positioning by being transparent about what their software did and didn’t do. They didn’t claim their platform could handle complex title issues or replace human judgment on difficult cases. They explicitly positioned it as handling the mechanical steps while leaving analysis and decision-making to professionals.

This transparency built trust in ways overclaiming never could. Title officers could evaluate the platform knowing it wasn’t trying to replace their expertise, just eliminate tasks they didn’t enjoy anyway. The lack of hype or overreach made the actual capabilities more credible.

The fact that CHAMPtitles was also running their own title agency added another layer of trust. They weren’t outsiders claiming to understand title work—they were title professionals who built tools for themselves and were now sharing them with the industry. They carried the same liability their customers did, which meant they understood why certain decisions must remain human.

The Economic Argument

Beyond the professional identity concerns, CHAMPtitles’ approach also made better economic sense for title agencies. The bottleneck in title operations isn’t analysis—it’s the mechanical work that comes before analysis can even begin. A title officer can’t evaluate title issues until someone has found and reviewed all the relevant documents.

By automating the mechanical steps, CHAMPtitles allowed title agencies to handle more volume without proportionally increasing headcount. Title officers could process more closings because they weren’t spending hours on document retrieval and data entry. The automation scaled the mechanical work, allowing human expertise to serve more transactions.

This created a clear value proposition without threatening jobs. Title agencies could grow revenue without expanding teams dramatically. Title officers could process more closings and earn more without working longer hours on tedious tasks. Everyone benefited from the efficiency gains without anyone losing their role.

Where Human Judgment Remains Essential

CHAMPtitles’ selective approach to automation also acknowledged the reality that some aspects of title work genuinely require human expertise and shouldn’t be automated—at least not yet.

Complex title issues, unusual situations, and judgment calls about risk all remain in the human domain. When a title officer needs to determine whether an old lien was properly released, or how a particular easement affects the property, or whether a legal description is accurate—these require expertise that software can’t easily replicate.

By leaving these decisions to humans, CHAMPtitles avoided the liability issues that plague automation attempts that try to replace judgment. They also avoided the trust issues that arise when software makes decisions about complex situations. Title officers remained responsible for the same judgments they always made—they just had more time to make them because automation handled everything else.

The Broader Lesson

CHAMPtitles’ approach reveals a principle that applies beyond title insurance: in industries where professionals fear automation, the path to adoption isn’t to promise that your technology is better than humans—it’s to clearly delineate between tasks that require expertise and tasks that are just mechanical, then automate only the latter.

This requires genuine understanding of the work you’re automating. You can’t draw this distinction from outside the industry. You need to have done the work yourself to know which parts require judgment and which parts are just repetitive labor wearing the disguise of expertise.

It also requires honest positioning. The temptation is to claim your software can do more than it actually does. But in conservative industries with significant liability, underpromising and overdelivering builds more trust than the reverse ever could.

The Result

By positioning their platform as a tool that eliminates busywork rather than replaces expertise, CHAMPtitles transformed the automation conversation in title insurance. They turned resistance into enthusiasm by showing title professionals that automation could make their work more fulfilling, not obsolete.

The approach required patience and restraint. They could have claimed more, promised more, tried to automate more. Instead, they focused on doing one thing exceptionally well: handling the mechanical work that everyone agreed didn’t require human expertise anyway.

In industries resistant to change, sometimes the best way to drive adoption is to clearly define what you’re not trying to automate—and make it clear that the expertise professionals spent years developing remains as valuable as ever.