No stockbroker uses AI, most `powered by AI’ are marketing claims: Nithin Kamath

The statement by the company founder & CEO Nithin Kamath in a twitter post came in response to queries as to whether the online platform uses AI/ML/Blockchain. “I keep saying we don’t and haven’t found any use-case yet,” Kamath said, and shared the opinion of his colleague and chief technology officer (CTO) Kailash Nadh.

According to him, the brokerage uses no AI or ML systems apart from a commodity image recognition tool for processing images during onboarding. “We have not come across any problems yet where we have felt the need to turn to ML solutions.”

Capital markets regulator SEBI runs a quarterly AI/ML survey where it seeks data on AI/ML usage from every broker in India. “The last time we had spoken to the team that handled this at SEBI, they had said that no broker had reported any usage despite many openly advertising “AI powered” technologies. From my interactions with the industry, I am strongly inclined to say that most of the claims of being “powered by AI” is superfluous marketing, pure hogwash. Bulk of the AI/ML usage, if any at all, are commodity tools that can be plugged in trivially that do not even warrant mention let alone strong “powered by AI” marketing,” the CTO said in a note that was shared on the micro-blogging site and other social media by Kamath.

Nadh, the brain behind Zerodha’s technology and products, holds a PhD in Artificial Intelligence & Computational Linguistics from the Middlesex University, London. “Anecdotally, pretty much every single instance of “AI-first mindset” that I have seen in the industry have been strong cases of misguided assumptions, outright delusions, and often, intellectual dishonesty. “AI-first mindset tends to fall into the solution looking for a problem category so much that personally, I am highly sceptical of anything labelled “powered by AI,” Nadh said.

In a chat with ET, the 34-year old chief technology officer explained that AI/ML has no bearing on the quality of a product as AI is a very generic term, yet it is loosely used everywhere. AI/ML have become so commoditised that it sounds very vague unless someone is using a cutting-edge AI/ML tool to solve a specific problem. “It is as good as saying our car is powered by petrol or diesel. AI/ML labels are not really a meaningful selling pitch for most products,” he said.