Public.com CEO on AI agent rollout: AI makes it easier to be a sophisticated investor

[0:00]Investing platform public.com is rolling out AI agents to help members automate their investment strategies. Joining us with more, Yannick Molling, the CEO of public.com. Yannick, welcome. This is fascinating. So tell me what this agent can do for me. Yeah, so today we're rolling out AI agents for investing. Um, and so this is the easiest, safest way to put AI agents to work directly in your portfolio. And the way it works is pretty simple. In the public app, there's like a tab in the app called agents. From there you chat with an AI and you can set up agents that monitor markets, manage cash and even execute trades. So, for example, I have a bunch of agents now running, one that takes the oil prices every morning and automatically implements protective put options as a hedge if they spike. I have another one that takes cash from my bank account, puts it into my bond portfolio to make sure that I'm always yielding the most. And even have one that scans for covered call opportunities every day across my portfolio and alerts me if there's like a low risk way that I can make 5 grands this week. And so there are thousands of use cases already, um, and we think this really changes how people think about, um, and manage their portfolios. I think it's interesting to think about an agent who can automatically hedge because sometimes you get busy during the day and you want to implement these things, and it's much easier to verbally speak it as a put as opposed to putting limit orders or whatever in there. Um, but the aspect of help me generate $5,000 a month in covered call premiums, actually tasking it with finding opportunities to invest in, have you back tested that? Yeah, I mean, like, so I think that's the big user interface shift, by the way, right? Like, we've always been ultimately manually entering orders. And I think there's a shift now because there's more about just setting objectives, expressing intent, and so instead of, you know, buy 200 shares of Apple at this price. The command might be, um, increase my position if valuations compress another 15% from here, for example, right? And so the AI agent will sort of help you at every step of the way. It's very conversational, so it'll help you set up all the guard rails around various strategies that you want to implement. And then once you implement it, it actually runs in a fully deterministic workflow to ensure that there can't be any hallucinations or any improvisations from your account from that. But you can say, okay, I buy this, a couple hundred shares. I don't want to lose more than X and put a stop in there. And uh, actually, could you say, uh, I want some income, write some covered calls, that it really, that Absolutely. Yeah, I have one that write covered calls for me automatically every month across my top positions in a very low risk way, so it has a good understanding of what risk is. Because it runs inside your public.com brokerage account. It obviously knows what you own. It knows your risk tolerance, your investment goals, et cetera, and so it also has the opportunity to be a much more personal to you as an individual. How does it know which call strike, which I mean, do you have to implement that yourself or do you just say, help me generate extra income by writing covered calls? You'll say help me generate, and it will ask you some questions maybe about risk and and a few things and it will lay out a couple of options for you. Typically boil everything down to like three options and then you pick the final one yourself, but then it implements the strategy for you, so you never have to sit there and buy it at any point in time. He has an options show, but he has an, he used to. He used That was a good show. How long's it been gone? Like eight years. It's been a decade. Um, could you say, okay, I, I think, I mean, I'm just think it sophisticated strategies. I, I think the market's gonna end here in a month, whether it so I wanna, I wanna do a straddle, I wanna do a, a short straddle. Bull call spreads, straddle, whatever you want. It'll do any of them. Really? I think it's the problem is it's always been really hard to be really sophisticated, and AI completely changes that because you can now start implementing something like a covered call strategy on your account without having to read an options chain, get too deep in the greeks, et cetera. It all happens through natural language with an AI directly in your brokerage account, right? So this is not something you need to install different things. It runs securely, transparently in your brokerage amount. You can always see exactly what the AI is doing, so you have full control. Um, and so like I said, I think we think it's a, it's a big leap in how people will invest. It's fascinating. It's, it's good for business because you said since the AI agent launch, 50% of conversations led to a transaction within 24 hours. Can a customer sort of run it parallel and see how your portfolio can be enhanced before actually using it? Absolutely. You can run as many as you want. They're free of charge, by the way, as well, if you're a public.com customer, obviously. Um, and the way we think about it is like, look, um, every new technology in our industry has always created new type of brokerage, right? We used to trade on the phone, then the dawn of the internet gave us the discount broker, the shift to mobile gave us the Neo broker, and now with AI, it's the era of the agentic brokerage. And I think what's interesting about that is, it's, it actually goes back to be more of a full service model. Like your broker used to call you with trade ideas and research, et cetera, but then with the shift to web and later mobile, we reduced the role of a broker to just trade execution. I think the agentic brokerage model reverses that trend and even more so because this thing is so much more powerful than a human broker. I mean, you can write your own algorithmic trading strategy like 10 seconds. Do you think we'll get to the point where the agent will contact you about opportunities? Because right now it's initiated by the customer. Right now it's still reactive in the sense that it's initiated by the customer. Um, we are certainly playing around with some proactive kind of things, um, and we very much think that's where the future is headed as well. And I'm not talking the long-term future. This thing is evolving really, really fast. It's the most rapidly evolving product that I've ever seen in my career. And uh, so we're very excited about how this is gonna evolve over the next few months.