Short answer: Jake Trefethen says Public launched Alpha, a research bot first powered by GPT-4, then added features like earnings call summaries, and is testing generated assets: custom indexes built from natural language. Emily Kurtz says Public was first to offer fractional bonds.
Watch this answer from Episode 8 (starts at 17:18) · Episode 8 notes and transcript
From Episode 8: Can Public Make You a Better Investor?, starting at 17:18.
Sam Nadler [17:17]: Okay. Great. Well, thanks, Jordan. We did cover just, like, a brief intro about Public. But if you guys don't mind, I'd love to hear, like, kind of the wider perspective of Public and Jake, like, how you're applying generative I AI and what your role entails.
Jake Trefethen [17:36]: Yeah. For sure. I guess I can give a little quick intro on Public and then dial into the AI stuff. So, we think about, like, public as kind of the home for modern investors. So, I think generally the landscape has kind of two type of tech forward incumbents. You've got kind of robo advisers, and you've got self directed kind of brokerages. And, when you're looking at higher net worth individuals and more sophisticated investors, it's not always true that you want one or the other. Sometimes you want to be able to directly manage your accounts, and sometimes you want to have a little bit of help. And so, we see kind of the modern, the inevitability of this whole kind of platform shift to round out to something where people can dial into their own preferred experience, still have access to manage solutions, but also not have to, go through a wealth advisor at Morgan Stanley just to initiate a transfer. Right?
Jake Trefethen [18:41]: And one of the big pillars we kind of see in what the modern, sophisticated investing platform needs to have is a solid focus on AI native features. I mean, we know that that's gonna be a huge part of the future. We've been kind of a first mover, I guess, amongst peers in that space. We launched Alpha, which is our investment research bot powered originally by GPT four just a couple months after, ChatGPT released. We were one of the first ChatGPT plug ins. And then after we released Alpha, we introduced probably, like, six or seven different AI powered features across the brokerage experience. We launched one or two kind of external products as well that were, vertically focused on AI. So we've done everything from real time, event summarization, earnings call summaries
Emily Kurtz [19:35]: Why is it moving?
Jake Trefethen [19:36]: Portfolio construction, explaining, why stocks, your portfolio market's moving. And we've we've kind of experimented a lot in the space, and we've we think we've gotten to a place now, I think, where we've identified what we see as the big value drivers for, AI native, kind of the next phase of, like, true value unlock in the space. So one of the big opportunities we see is obviously just summarization. There's so much unstructured content in this space between news cycles for stocks that you own, the market macro as a whole, and then, just dialing into what's actually important for your portfolio and getting insights out of all of that kind of jargon that's, spewing out of the news cycle. And so we think AI has a real value add there. A second vertical we think is really interesting is assisting with portfolio construction, helping to kind of manage investments with the help of generative AI.
Emily Kurtz [20:31]: And like an extension of that, right, is discovery. So how can we help you and they find assets that are relevant for you or that meet your needs versus your traditional, search where you have to be searching for the exact symbols that you're looking for.
Jake Trefethen [20:43]: Yeah. So as an example, we started experimenting with this feature we're calling generated assets. But the idea is to let investors build custom indexes out of natural language kind of queries. So kind of imagine whatever strategy you wanna come up with, you can go back and forth with an AI and dial in kind of an LLM, agentic assisted index that, eventually will hopefully be able to manage on an ongoing kind of basis. Imagine stuff like, I wanna invest in GLP ones, or I wanna do an anti tariff hedge, or something like that. And we see that kind of filling a gap in the space between your kind of traditional low cost ETFs, and then, your kind of higher cost thematic ETFs, or even somewhere like a, just like a personal wealth adviser. We think that's a really interesting space as well, and we're working a lot there.
Jordan Metzner [21:38]: Yeah. Just, I guess, a little bit more maybe about Public and kind of what's its mission, and really what the goal of the company is.
Emily Kurtz [21:45]: As I mentioned, Public is really a retail brokerage app, and our goal is really to status to meet the needs of investors that take investing seriously. And so over the last year, we spent a lot of time on building that foundation, adding a variety of asset classes, adding fractional bonds, being the first to do that, adding, a treasury ladder, really meeting the market with yield products as well as also expanding on the more active tier front. So adding options, adding margin investing. And I think what we're really looking ex we're we're looking forward to over the next year is how we build upon that and really leverage AI to deliver unique value propositions that we really feel like public can deliver in a way that the market has not seen yet and hasn't had. And so I know Jake talked about generated assets. I think there's opportunities for us to create more portfolios across asset classes, expand that into other account types. So rather than it just be your brokerage account, maybe using those in sort of trust entity other account types and really helping meet the needs of that investor that's looking to grow their wealth for the long term in a really current time frame way versus that, historical traditional brokerage, where you have to call an adviser and get advice.
Jordan Metzner [22:54]: Wow. Awesome. Okay. Cool. Let's jump into it.
