It’s almost like a predictable daily routine with which AI enters a new industry, opening up numerous possibilities that prompt CEOs to start wondering about the future of their businesses.
And the most recent one at this juncture is Nithin Kamath, the founder and CEO of Zerodha.
The company manages over 1.6 crore clients in the country, and with several industry experts predicting that AI will revolutionise the stock market, what must be going through the mind of the individual overseeing assets worth over ₹6 lakh crore for Indians?
In a recent post on X, Kamath said, “It feels to me like we’re at the beginning of a massive shift in how financial services will work.” Only a few days ago, Zerodha announced a new feature that lets users analyse their portfolio with AI—more on that shortly.
He mentioned that, eventually, all segments in financial services, ranging from trading and banking to payments, will not only be supported or enhanced by AI but will also be driven by custom AI-powered applications created by users through natural language prompts.
So What’s the Role of the Broker?
While platforms like Zerodha do the heavy lifting in terms of helping users invest and trade in the stock market today, Kamath envisioned how this might change. “Likely, we’ll just be a set of ‘pipes’ connecting users to exchanges and back-office systems. The interfaces will mostly be built by users themselves,” Kamath said.
“The only way to stay relevant is to ensure we’re the best pipe: fast, efficient, reliable, and invisible when it matters,” he added.
He mentioned that this has been the company’s goal for a long time, even before the emergence of AI. Over the years, Zerodha’s tech team has been ‘obsessively’ working to make the systems faster, more scalable, and prepared for the future. Since its inception, the company has built and scaled a stock broking tech stack from the ground up, and has also made several efforts to develop open-source tools and frameworks.
“Even if these improvements don’t immediately change a customer’s trading or reporting experience, we’ve chosen to fix every possible bottleneck today, not later,” Kamath explained.
He added that given the dominance of today’s AI tools and their results, this shift isn’t a matter of ‘if’ but ‘when’. “It might take a few years or a decade, but it’s inevitable. Human advisors will still have a role, mainly to help people stick to what these tools recommend,” Kamath said.
“In a future where everything is automated, trust and infrastructure will be our only real moats,” Kamath said, indicating that the company intentionally held back on AI-driven features like order placement and plans to add AI features only where it is necessary.
While Kamath indicates that it is still a grey area and unpredictable to imagine the exact pathway with which AI will impact Zerodha and its services, the company has taken its first steps in this journey.
‘Zerodha’s Kite MCP for Portfolio Insights is Mind-Blowing’
Recently, the company announced a feature that allows users to link their Zerodha accounts to AI assistants, such as Anthropic’s Claude.
This is achieved through Anthropic’s open-source Model Context Protocol (MCP) framework, which enables AI assistants and chatbots to connect with external databases and information sources to retrieve the necessary context for answering user queries.
This feature enables users to link their portfolio and request a comprehensive analysis of its performance across different timeframes, including sector exposure, diversification, and additional insights.
Source: Nithin Kamath, X.
Moreover, users have the option to set alerts when their portfolio deviates from specific targets, view profit or gain percentages, check current holdings, review account information, and more.
Since its release, several users have adopted it and, for the most part, have had a positive experience.
“Honestly, seeing AI like Claude integrate with platforms like Zerodha’s Kite MCP for portfolio insights is mind-blowing! I think it’s a huge step towards democratising sophisticated analysis,” a user wrote on X.
Another user said that the feature allowed them to analyse their entire portfolio against the Nifty 50 Index over the past four years, all with a single prompt. “I can literally build my own personal finance manager with a few prompts! Crazy times,” they wrote on X.
While Zerodha is one of the first stockbrokers in the country to integrate MCP, several fintech startups in the country, like Razorpay, Fi.Money, Cashfree, and others have implemented the framework into their services.
Having said that, the company said it is taking security “seriously” with the Kite MCP feature. The AI assistant can only access data that the user explicitly authorises. The user’s credentials are never transmitted to the AI assistant; authentication always happens externally via Kite. Moreover, all actions are read-only, and order placement is only possible for GTT orders.
“We are optimistic about this new technology at the same time cognizant about the potential risks,” Kamath said.
Kailash Nadh, the company’s chief technology officer, emphasised his thoughts about MCP in a blog post, which he calls a viral protocol that is “all the rage now”.
Although he described MCP as a ‘radical departure’ from traditional system integration, shifting significant control from service providers to users, he also expressed concerns about relying solely on AI systems for decision-making and mediation.
“What about errors and failures with real-world implications that occur in the midst of AI orchestration across critical services? How would those be debugged and traced? How would accountability be established? Will regulations and governance models emerge for AI-mediated automagical actions across services?” he asked.
“Whether the long-term implications of MCP’s viral, cross-cutting spread will be net positive or not is unclear to me.”
The post Nithin Kamath Imagines Zerodha in a World of AI appeared first on Analytics India Magazine.
