Loan Market Group’s head of HR reveals how she’s turned AI from hype into a daily habit across both corporate staff and brokers – reshaping role design, recruitment and capability building along the way.
When Hannah Timcke walked on stage to accept Loan Market Group’s HR award last year, generative AI was still mostly a talking point. Months later, the head of HR says it is now embedded in the way the mortgage brokerage network works, hires and plans its future workforce.
Speaking ahead of the 2026 HR Awards, Timcke describes a function – and a business – that has moved decisively past experimentation to everyday use.
Loan Market Group, which runs on Google, has rolled out Gemini enterprise-wide and encourages staff to treat it as a core tool rather than a novelty.
“I use it all day, every day,” Timcke said. That ranges from “payroll variance reporting and [spotting] anomalies in payroll data” through to drafting “clauses for carve outs for contracts” and partnering on the design of training programs and performance and reward frameworks.
Leaders are expected to do the same.
“Our leaders have taken it on and they will draft performance discussions and use it as a bit of a coach to help them go into difficult conversations,” she explained. Managers then send their drafted communications to HR for sense-checking, but much of the time-consuming back-and-forth has gone.
“We’re probably saving hours, maybe not days, but it’s cut out so much time in the manual creation of things. It’s been incredible.”
For Timcke, the real differentiator is not a specific platform but the culture and time commitment around AI.
“Everyone in our business is certainly on the AI train and absolutely encouraged to use it, to play with it, be really curious,” she said.
That curiosity is structured. Loan Market Group has an “AI hour of power” every Friday, where the entire business is tasked with experimenting, solving real pain points and sharing wins and failures.
There is also an active AI Slack channel where staff post ideas, prompts and use cases. The staff has access to a “big suite of all of the main AI tools” and curated learning via LinkedIn Learning and the internal “Brokerversity” education team.
“The business is really invested in giving our people time to do that and encouraging them to share wins, losses, learnings across our whole group,” she said. “I feel like as a business we’ve really embraced it.”
Even core people systems are evolving quickly. Timcke noted that when she won the HR award, it was off the back of implementing a new HRIS.
“Even those systems themselves now have evolved with their own inbuilt AI functionality that we didn’t have at that time,” she said. “It’s incredible to see how all of the systems that we use have their own AI embedded in them now already.”
AI as both biggest challenge and biggest opportunity
Looking towards 2026 and beyond, Timcke sees AI reshaping fundamental questions of work design, workforce planning and capability building.
“The way that we work is going to be a really big challenge,” she said. “How we structure roles and what percentage of roles are going to be able to be done by AI versus where you need a human in the middle to [drive] and make judgment calls… getting that balance right, I think, will be really interesting.”
That has direct implications for HR, especially for workforce planning and role design. Traditional models of who sits in “tech”, “engineering” and “developer” roles are being blurred. “Everyone really has a hand in doing some of that now with AI,” Timcke said. “What you relied on other people for previously, you can now do a lot more yourself.”
Reskilling and recruitment will also be affected/ As AI capabilities grow, so does the need to understand “what we need moving forward and recruiting to get those skills”.
Global economic uncertainty, shifting housing and real estate markets, and evolving legislation all add complexity for a financial services business. At the same time, cyber security is “a massive focus”.
“We handle a lot of personal information so making sure we’re really at the top of our game with our security” is non‑negotiable, said Timcke.
Reframing talent: hiring for ‘AI curiosity’
One of the clearest shifts in Loan Market Group’s talent strategy is the way it positions AI in role design and recruitment.
“We’re probably not at the stage where we’re demanding really high level proficiency in AI,” Timcke said. “We understand that maybe not everyone has had that level of exposure yet, but we’re certainly looking for people who are AI‑curious, confident, willing to experiment and use it to find better ways of doing things.”
In practice, that now shows up in job ads and position descriptions. Timcke pointed to a current vacancy for an HR business partner in Melbourne where “AI curiosity” is explicitly called out.
One of her own KPIs is “absolutely embedding AI across the business” and rethinking ways of working in the people and culture team – and she expects new hires to share that mindset.
“None of us are experts, we’re all still learning,” she said. “But it’s absolutely something that is not going anywhere. If you’ve got someone that’s really comfortable to have a play with that and really curious about what it can offer, that’s a really valuable skill set.”
Over time, she expects to move from curiosity to defined skills.
“As we become more competent with AI, we’ll certainly be looking at specific levels of AI skills for other roles across the business. People are really in a learning phase at the moment and everyone’s sort of upskilling and trying to reskill a bit as well.”
For HR leaders, "the horse has bolted"
Reflecting on the pace of change since her award win, Timcke is frank about what it means for the profession.
“It feels like AI just has literally happened right in that time,” she said. “The horse has bolted and if you’re not on it, you’re behind – and even if you are on it, you’re already behind. It’s just evolving so quickly.”
For HR leaders, she suggests the priority is no longer debating whether to use AI but focusing on:
- Creating safe, enterprise‑grade access so people can experiment “for whatever, safely”.
- Carving out protected time – like Loan Market Group’s AI hour of power – so AI work is not just an afterthought.
- Hiring and developing for curiosity now, with a path towards clearer AI proficiency expectations later.
- Rethinking role design and workforce plans with AI in mind, not as an add‑on.
“It’s freeing our people up to definitely spend their time on the value‑add stuff and less of the administrative manual work that historically we’ve had to do,” Timcke added.
Nominations for the 2026 HR Awards are now open. They close on Friday, 8 May 2026 (11:59pm). To learn more about the event, click here.
