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For a growing number of Indian investors turning to generic AI tools for investment advice, a combination of judgement and scepticism may well be the smartest and safest strategy

Outside his role as Chief Product Officer at aviation strategy firm SimpliFlying, Shubhodeep Pal enjoys building vibe-coded, AI-powered apps for himself. When the investor in him wanted to “take the whimsy out” of his investment strategies, he turned to AI. “AI built the system within days under my guidance, complete with data, signals, even a back-test going as far as 2018,” he recalls. “On the first run with real market data, it caught and fixed five of its own bugs.”

How then does he assess AI as an investment adviser? “It can be very wrong while sounding very wise,” he admits. His rule is: “It proposes, but I approve every trade.” For Pal, any result that looks too good is a bug until proven otherwise. “No one, not even AI, can predict markets,” he says. “The most exciting part is that systematic investing, which would ordinarily need a huge quant team or an expensive degree, can now be run from a laptop.”

Clocking In With AI

Pal’s approach holds a vital lesson for a growing number of retail Indian investors seeking investment advice from AI—the newest oracle in town that comes dressed in an algorithm, talks with near certainty about a notoriously uncertain space and loses no sleep over the Street’s tantrums despite having no qualifications or experience. What makes the lesson even more pertinent is that these investors, unlike Pal, are using generic tools such as ChatGPT, Claude and Gemini.