'Many companies will let go of employees, blame it on AI ... we will not fire anyone.' Zerodha creates policy, founder Nithin Kamath shares rule book

The three-year-long pandemic and global uncertainty have put a lot of pressure on new businesses.

Several start-ups adopted artificial intelligence (AI) to cut costs and their bosses resorted to mass lay-offs to keep businesses afloat, which in turn caused immense stress in the lives of working professionals.

As the world gets closer to relying on AI to make their lives simpler, stock broking platform Zerodha has a completely unique approach in making AI a part of their daily operations.



When the world was claiming to be powered by AI nearly two years ago, Zerodha founder and CEO Nithin Kamath didn't find a use case for the same.

Fast forward to 2023. With recent breakthroughs in technology, Kamath decided to incorporate an internal AI policy for Zerodha as job insecurity continues to plague people around the world following the tech world seeing a slowdown. According to the new rule book he shared on LinkedIn, the policy will give better clarity to the Zerodha team and help them navigate AI fears and job loss anxiety.

"We’ve just created an internal AI policy Zerodha to give clarity to the team, given the AI/job loss anxiety. This is our stance: 'We will not fire anyone on the team just because we have implemented a new piece of technology that makes an earlier job redundant,'" the top boss proudly announced on the professional networking platform.

Echoing Zerodha CTO Kailash Nadh's thoughts from a recent chat, Kamath wrote, "AI on its own won’t wake up and kill us all (for a while, at least!). The current capitalistic and economic systems will rapidly adopt AI, accelerating inequality and loss of human agency. That’s the immediate risk."

The Rainmatter Founder & CEO cited the numerous problems capitalism will cause in the coming future - from prioritising profits over people to wealth inequality. As time passes, Kamath said that profits and money will overpower the value of employees. Many organisations will lay off employees and blame AI for redundancy, making things worse for humanity. This, he wrote, is something that Zerodha leadership would refrain from practising.

"In today's capitalism, businesses prioritise shareholder value creation above stakeholders like employees, customers, vendors, the country, & the planet. Markets incentivise business leaders to prioritise profits over everything else; if not, shareholders vote them out. Many 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. This isn't a good outcome for humanity," he wrote in a detailed post.

However, for Kamath, people continue to play a crucial role, which is why he decided to draft an internal AI policy to comfort his staff. Even as government intervention to regulate AI has a long way to go, organisations around the world wouldn't want to "sit idle while another becomes more powerful on the back of AI."

Kamath also tried his hand at Leonardo Da Vinci-style digital art created by AI, which showed a CEO being replaced by robots.

"It is unlikely that humans will be able to compete with intelligent machines in many walks of life. I have never done digital art, but it took me a few seconds to create this image of a CEO being replaced by an intelligent machine in the style of Da Vinci," he added.

In his parting thoughts, Kamath said the "real impact of AI on humanity" will take a few years to show.

"It'll take a few years for us 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 concluded his post.