Jannick Malling joins us now. He is the co-CEO of Public, here to talk all about the intersection of agentic AI with personal portfolio management. Man, oh man. That's right. What an announcement this week. Congratulations. Thank you so much. So, you're introducing AI agents to manage portfolios. That's right. Full transparency. I've already signed up for the wait list directly on the Public app. Great. Wonderful. What are you hoping this does for the everyday investor?
Look, I think it's a big user interface shift, right? Every new technology brings about a new kind of brokerage model. We're used to trading on the phone. then went to the web, we had the discount broker with the shift to mobile, we had the Neo broker, and I think with AI, we're now in the era of what we call the agentic brokerage. And so, instead of having to buy 100 shares of Apple at this price, it changes the user experience to be more about instructions, expressing intent. So instead of buying the Apple shares, you might say, increase my position when valuations compress another 20% from here, or if certain multiples, go in various directions. And so we're very excited about how this sort of helps individual investors, in particular, have many more resources available to manage their portfolios.
You know, it's one thing to trust a wealth advisor who's a human being. People are going to see this announcement, as exciting as it is, and say, where do I draw the line? How much input, how little input do I have relative to the agents? How are you approaching that, especially for something that could be as choppy as trading options? That's not easy for the first-time investor.
So we've designed this in a way where there's a lot of guardrails around it, and it really is a very conversational AI model that will help you flush out whatever strategy you want, whether it's a risk management tactic that you want to implement, whether it's money movement. I have one that looks at the oil prices every morning, and if they spike, it automatically implements protective puts in my portfolio. So I don't have to see all these red dates. I mean, the last couple of days haven't been that bad, thankfully. And so we really think it's a big change in how a lot of people can do things like risk management, automate trading strategies and the like.
Yeah. I mean, one thing again, it's not to give a personal plug here, but one thing I've always liked about the public app, you always have instructions, video instructions. especially as you introduce first-time investors to more complicated investing strategies. What can people expect if they hear this and they say, hey, I really want to make sure, Yannick, I know what I'm doing before I turn over this sort of work to an agent?
I think that's really one of the keys about this product. Once you're in a conversation with AI, there's a big educational element to that. It can help you understand exactly what a strategy might mean for your account, right? And so that conversational interface we actually think is a huge unlock for people to become more sophisticated without necessarily having to read through hours and hours of YouTube content, reading all the Greeks, understanding an options train. If you can say, hey, here are my parameters. I'm looking to make five grand this week selling covered calls, but I want to take low risk. I don't want to get called on it. The AI can do all the work and fill the gap in between having that idea and then implementing the strategy, and that is the big user-interface shift.
Yeah, no disrespect to the Greeks, by the way. You've got to learn the basics and the trading technicals if you're in this stuff. Even taking a step back from this big announcement for you guys at Public, what do you see as the near-term future of AI-driven investing? You've got to have some sense of what comes even right after 2026.
We were actually the first and still the only brokerage, I believe, to have an officially maintained open-claw skill. That has been absolutely on a tear. Volumes are doubling every month in that business. And so we think there's generally two models. There's the fully autonomous sort of open-claw model. You have zero control. There's a lot of security risks you got to mitigate. You got to learn how to set some of this stuff up. What agents inside public does is kind of different for one, Once you have designed your strategy, it runs in a deterministic fashion, so there can be no hallucinations. Instead of no control, you have full control and full transparency, by the way, because you see every single action that the agent is taking. And obviously, because it runs inside your public.com brokerage account, there are no security risks for you to worry about. And it's protected by the same bank-level security that protects your portfolio and all your assets.
I got less than a minute left. General trends you're seeing for the retail investor here in 2026. I know you and the team at Public, you got to keep up with all the trends and the demands that they're asking for. Oh, absolutely.
I think diversification has become a huge topic, right? Like a lot of people talk about Bitcoin is the new gold. Then it turns out maybe gold's the new gold. You know, the bond market continues to be kind of very interesting because I think 12 months ago, everybody would have maybe expected rates to just go much further down than they have been. And so I think, again, AI can play a really big role in helping people diversify more, think sort of about their portfolios from a little bit of a different lens than what they used to when they're just looking at tables and buy buttons.
Jack, finally, nice, after all these years, to finally meet you. Thanks for coming down and for being on the show. Congrats on the big announcement.
