Retail
Robinhood, Public and startup Podium Markets AI are building AI agents that manage retail portfolios and trade around the clock, with Citizens fintech research head Devin Ryan predicting "effectively everybody has their own family office that is working 24/7 for them"
Robinhood has opened its platform to third-party AI agents connecting directly to customer accounts, Public is building proprietary agents inside its own ecosystem, and Podium Markets AI's assistant Ivy analyses a customer's holdings across multiple brokerages to generate recommendations, with Ryan estimating an investor placing two trades a month today could see an AI system execute 20 in a single day.
The two-trades-a-month-to-twenty-trades-a-day estimate is the number to sit with, because it describes a change in kind, not just degree. A retail investor who trades occasionally is making a small number of discrete, considered decisions; an AI agent executing 20 trades a day is running something closer to a continuous rebalancing process, reacting to market conditions in near real time. That is a fundamentally different relationship between an investor and their portfolio, and it is arriving for ordinary retail accounts on the same platforms people already use, not through a separate institutional product.
Robinhood's choice to let third-party agents connect directly to customer accounts is the more consequential design decision here, more so than Public or Podium building their own in-house tools. An in-house agent is Public's own product, built and controlled end to end by one company that retail investors already trust. Third-party agents connecting to Robinhood accounts introduces a chain of responsibility: the AI developer built the agent, Robinhood built the connection, and the customer authorised the access, which is precisely the accountability question House Democrats put to the SEC this week in their letter demanding oversight clarity by 31 July, covered separately on this site.
Ivy's approach, analysing a customer's portfolio across multiple brokerage accounts rather than just the one it lives on, points at where retail AI agents have a genuine edge over a human advisor working from the same information. A human advisor typically only sees the accounts a client discloses and remembers to update; software that has standing read access can aggregate a complete picture continuously. Whether customers are comfortable granting that level of access across every account they hold is a separate, unresolved question from whether the technology can do it.
Ryan's framing, that this is coming "in the next few years" rather than a decade out, matches the pace of the regulatory scramble happening in parallel. If retail AI trading agents scale as fast as brokerages are building for, the SEC's answer on registration and liability by 31 July will already be behind the market it is trying to govern rather than ahead of it.
Read the original: CNBC - Robinhood, Public and startup Podium Markets AI are building AI agents that manage retail portfolios and trade around the clock, with Citizens fintech research head Devin Ryan predicting "effectively everybody has their own family office that is working 24/7 for them". Commentary is the independent editorial view of Share Trading; the original article is credited to its publisher.