'We'll not fire anyone on the team,' Zerodha CEO says, unveiling internal AI policy

Kamath said in today's capitalistic world, businesses prioritise shareholder value creation above stakeholders like employees, customers, vendors, the country, and the planet.

Online brokerage firm Zerodha has created an internal artificial intelligence (AI) policy to give clarity to the team in light of the rising anxiety among people about tech eliminating jobs, CEO Nithin Kamath said on the social media platform.

"We will not fire anyone on the team just because we have implemented a new piece of technology that makes an earlier job redundant,” he shared Zerodha’s stance while announcing the policy on Twitter.

Reiterating his 2021 claim of not founding AI use cases, he shared a screenshot of his associate “Mr K” who said, “...apart from a commodity image recognition tool for processing images during onboarding, we use no other AI or ML systems. We have not come across any problems yet where we felt the need to turn to ML solutions.”

The development comes in light of a Goldman Sachs report that said that the rise of artificial intelligence could put 300 million jobs at risk. The report predicted “significant disruption” to the labour market, noting that two-thirds of jobs in the United States and Europe could be automated to a certain extent.

Kamath said that in today's capitalistic world, businesses prioritise shareholder value creation above stakeholders like employees, customers, vendors, the country and the planet. “Markets incentivize business leaders to prioritise profits over everything else; if not, shareholders vote them out.”

We’ve just created an internal AI policy @zerodhaonline to give clarity to the team, given the AI/job loss anxiety. This is our stance:

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"We will not fire anyone on the team just because we have implemented a new piece of technology that makes an earlier job redundant." 1/8

— Nithin Kamath (@Nithin0dha) May 12, 2023

According to him, companies will likely let go of employees and blame it on AI. “In the process, companies will earn more and make their shareholders wealthier, worsening wealth inequality,” he said, adding, “This isn't a good outcome for humanity.”

Though Kamath feels it is unlikely that humans will be able to compete with intelligent machines in many walks of life, he feels it'll take a few years to see the real impact of AI on humanity.

“Businesses with financial freedom should, if nothing else, give their teams that helped build the business time to adapt. I know some of this might sound weird coming from the CEO of a broking firm,” he said.

Recently, International Business Machines Chief Executive Officer Arvind Krishna said the company expects to pause hiring for roles it thinks could be replaced with artificial intelligence in the coming years.

Hiring in back-office functions — such as human resources — will be suspended or slowed, Krishna said in an interview. These non-customer-facing roles amount to roughly 26,000 workers, Krishna said. “I could easily see 30 percent of that getting replaced by AI and automation over five years.”