So you don't worry about a world where everybody has the same kind of super powerful AI that can trade for them and then there's effectively no edge?
The edge in anything is built by differentiation. If you're doing the same thing as everyone else, kind of definitionally, you have no edge. So you'll have to figure out how to be different. And I think that's been always true for trading.
The motivation is that we want to empower traders with all the best tools, and we want to put all of the power of a sophisticated hedge fund or algorithmic trading firm in your pocket. The beginning of my business career, I was in algorithmic trading, so I have a little bit of experience of what that looks like and what it is. And I think this is going to be a long mission that, to some degree, never ends, because the wealthy always find a way to get better stuff, which means our job is never done. And that's part of what makes it very, very fun.
A little bit of friction. One is not a lot of people want to use Claude Code or Codex. And you know, in our circles, we're a little bit more tech-savvy. Probably know a lot of people using Claude Code and Codex, but for your average individual, it's a little bit too complex. It's still kind of a developer tool for computer programmers. And the friction of going from your Claude, connecting it to an MCP, linking it to Robinhood, and having to like monitor in a different place where you're managing your strategy is not ideal. So that's one problem that we fixed with Robinhood Agents.
And for people who haven't used it yet or seen it, I mean, it basically takes 60 seconds to set up. You name your agent, pick your model, decide if you want to have trade approvals on for the agent, which I think is important. You guys are making it opt-in for the experience so that people, I think, can just get used to it, because it's going to be a new concept for a lot of people, especially the average Robinhood user. Like you said, they don't know about all these sophisticated tools and data sources that professional traders have access to.
And we put a lot of guardrails in at the beginning, and some customers actually say, 'Hey, I wanted to have access to everything.' But at this point, we still want it to be an affirmative decision: do you want it to be autonomous or do you want to approve everything? Well, by default, we'll make you approve everything, but we'll have a path if you want to try autonomous. And then the fact that it's in a separate account as well makes it so that you have to make an affirmative decision for it to trade your money. It won't just, yeah, you know, go rogue and do that.
I think that, I mean, it would be very easy for us to link it to your main account. I think part of the reason we wanted to do it is just to start small and to make sure that, you know, if we do get feedback from customers, we sort of tiptoe into the experience. A lot of people have been asking us for putting it into the main account, or you could imagine like a flag so that you could flag and turn on an agent, plug it into an existing account that you have. So yeah, that's something we're thinking about, but I don't think at this point it's a limitation of the product. I think a lot of customers really like being able to move things over and keep it separate. So probably the default being a separate account will continue at least for the time being.
You know, giving my AI my email or, you know, the keys to my brokerage account. I think we're going through the shift, and it happened with other new technologies too. I mean, I remember when the internet first became a big thing and people were very nervous punching their credit card number into a website.
It didn't feel secure. It was like a safety concern. And it took probably 10 years before it became clear that it's actually more secure than handing your credit card over at a brick-and-mortar register. Same with mobile. You know, when we got started with mobile, the Overton window hadn't shifted to mobile being your default way of managing your finances. Still, people thought of it as where I play games or do not-serious stuff. So the idea of my finances being on my phone seemed sacrilegious almost.
Yeah, I think we'll see the same thing here. We're starting to see it. And so we're probably early, but I think the time is soon.
I think a very large portion of the volume will be generated by AI agents. And I think that's because they don't have a lot of the limitations that we have as human traders. They can be up 24/7, right? They can be multi-asset class simultaneously.
So it's a lot of stuff, and that complexity is a challenge for humans, but for agents, it's just more context, more opportunity, more trade ideas. And so, you know, we've started seeing the earliest iterations of Robinhood Agents. We see people constructing option strategies, right? And it's like, I have a very specific thing that I want to do, a trade that I want to put on. Maybe it's an iron condor or something, and you know, it's just I can tell my agent and it'll take the data, it'll put it together. It makes that really, really easy. And that's kind of an automation use case. It's like removing a paper cut.
It's not as simple as like my AI is better than yours. There's a lot of like product stuff around it.
I mean, if you have a better AI than other people, I think that would be one form of edge. But yeah, I don't think very many people will be training their own AIs. But I mean, connecting it to unique pieces of data. We'll have a proliferation of apps in the agent app store, which now we have a relatively small number, but it's going to be open and we're going to be adding a lot more.
Things, to some degree, do get centralized because we have these models that are now looking at everything, but also the amount of things we can give them and the context and the tools are increasing as well.
