Nithin Kamath has this to say on Zerodha using AI, ML technologies

Artificial intelligence (AI) and Machine Learning (ML) are the new buzzwords in the broking community. That said, online broking firm Zerodha's co-founder Nithin Kamath has finally answered whether his company uses AI/ML or Blockchain technologies. Taking to Twitter, Kamath stated that Zerodha has not "found any use-case yet," while also sharing more information via "our man behind the scene, Dr K."

"I keep getting asked how we use AI/ML/Blockchain at  @zerodhaonline, and I keep saying we don't and haven't found any use-case yet. This time I asked our man behind the scene, Dr K, to comment. Couldn't help but share his response." Kamath posted on Twitter today.

With that, he also attached a screenshot of the comments shared by Kailash.

Here's what the screenshot reads:

"Like Nithin said, apart from a commodity recognition tool for processing images during onboarding, we use no AI or ML systems. We have not come across any problems yet where we have felt the need to turn to ML technology

To add a bit more context, SEBI, the capital market regulator, runs a quarterly AI/ML survey where they seek data on AI/ML usage from every broker in India. The last time we'd spoke to the team that handled this at SEBI, they said no broker had reported 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 powered technologies are superfluous marketing, pure  hogwash. Bulk of the AI/ML technologies, if not all, are commodity tool that can be plugged in trivially that do not even warrant mention let alone strong powered by AI advertising.

Anecdotally, pretty much every single instance of AI-first mindset that I have seen in the industry has been strong cases of misguided assumptions, outright delusion and often intellectually dishonesty. AI-first mindset tends to fall into the solution looking for a problem category so much that personally, I am highly skeptical of anything labeled as powered by AI."

Also read: Zerodha's Nithin Kamath sees hope for banks with no 'moat' in NITI Aayog's latest proposal
 

Meanwhile, large brokers are using these technologies to help their customers make investing decisions and get personalised services offered by e-commerce giants in India.

As of 30th June 2021, Zerodha constitutes around 19.06% of the total market share of the active clients registered on the National Stock Exchange. It has over 36.02 lakh active customers compared to a total of over 1.89 Crore active clients of all stockbrokers on the NSE.