Our business has grown multi-fold, but headcount remains flat: Cred’s Kunal Shah on AI’s impact

Kunal Shah, founder and CEO, CRED

Cred founder and CEO Kunal Shah addressed the impact of artificial intelligence (AI) on his fintech firm, stating that it has been expanding while maintaining a steady headcount over the past 2.5 to 3 years. “Our business has gone multi-fold but our headcount has remained flat for the last 2.5-3 years,” Shah said while speaking at the second edition of Mumbai Tech Week.

Although Cred’s employee count is not known publicly, its LinkedIn profile says almost 2,000 members have listed it as their current workplace. For the fiscal year ended 2024, Cred’s revenue touched nearly Rs 2,500 crore. It pared operational losses by 41 percent to Rs 609 crore, compared to Rs 1,024 crore in the previous year.

In FY21, Cred reported less than Rs 100 crore in revenue.

Shah mentioned that the cost of coding has dropped significantly due to AI and will dramatically drop in the days to come. “But there are not enough needs so everybody accelerates and builds software quickly, we will all be competing in each other’s territory, and our country’s per capita income is not big enough to serve so many companies,” the serial entreprenuer further said.

He added that Cred will start hiring more “high-judgment people” versus people who can just "work". He explained that most people just do the work for somebody who takes the judgment, and now the latter do not require people to do work as they can just use AI for the same.

“We would want to concentrate on more high-judgment people in our company so that we give a platform to them for more work and we would expand on things we wish to do in 2030, we might imagine doing things faster,” Shah said.

Shah predicted significant disruption in job markets due to AI, saying that many current jobs will become obsolete, with AI potentially replacing roles in fields like dermatology, customer support, and software development.

The cost of tasks like writing code has dramatically dropped from over 99 percent in the recent past, he says. Suggesting that professionals who can effectively use AI tools will become 2-3x more productive and potentially earn higher salaries.

Senior professionals with domain knowledge and good judgment will have an advantage, while fresh graduates might struggle if they don't adapt to AI tools rapidly.