Every BFSI conference I have attended this year has opened with some version of the same slide: an AI model replacing a human touchpoint. Underwriting, KYC, customer service, even relationship management are all headed, we are told, toward automation and a lot of it is true. AI is making fraud detection sharper, onboarding faster, and decisioning cheaper. I do not dispute any of that.
What I do dispute is the assumption baked into that slide that the agent, the human distributor sitting between a product and a first-time investor or borrower, is a cost line waiting to be optimised away. At InvestKraft, we have built our entire distribution model around agents and micro-entrepreneurs, and if anything, the more AI enters this industry, the more convinced I am that this network is not a legacy expense. It is our moat.
The trust gap AI cannot close
Financial products in India are not sold the way they are searched for. A customer in a tier 2 or tier 3 town does not wake up and decide to open a demat account or compare insurance riders on an app. They ask someone they trust - a neighbour who sells insurance on the side, a local shop owner who has become the informal financial advisor of the block, a young graduate building a side income by helping five families a month get their KYC right. That referral relationship is not a UX problem. It is a trust problem, and trust does not scale through a chatbot.
This is not nostalgia for a pre-digital model. It is an observation about where India's next wave of financial inclusion is actually coming from. As savings shift from fixed deposits toward equities and mutual funds, and as SIP flows have stayed resilient even through market corrections, the growth is increasingly coming from smaller cities and first-generation investors exactly the segment where a human intermediary is not a nice-to-have but the entire reason the transaction happens at all.
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Why "agent-led" and "tech-first" are not opposites
The contrarian part of our thesis is not that we reject technology. It is that we reject the framing that technology and human distribution are competing for the same budget line. At InvestKraft, our agents are not fighting our platform; they are powered by it. The technology exists to make an agent in a small town as capable as a wealth manager in a metro branch: instant onboarding, real-time product comparisons, automated compliance checks, and AI-assisted fraud screening running quietly in the background so the agent can focus on the one thing software still cannot do sit across the table and explain, in a language and tone the customer trusts, why a product fits their life.
We think of our agent network the way a good marketplace thinks of its supply side: not a cost to be minimised, but a distribution asset to be strengthened. Every agent who successfully onboards a family into their first mutual fund or insurance policy is not just closing a transaction. They are creating a relationship that compounds repeat business, referrals, and a level of retention that a pure-app acquisition funnel struggles to match, especially once customer acquisition costs across fintech continue to climb.
We have lived this scaling logic ourselves. InvestKraft started in 2022 with a team of 10. We have since grown to a workforce of 150+ across technology, sales, and distribution — and a meaningful share of that growth has gone into strengthening our agent and partner ecosystem, not shrinking it in favour of automation. That is a deliberate allocation, not an accident of hiring.
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The real risk in going all-in on automation
There is a quieter risk in the industry's rush toward full automation that does not get discussed enough: as AI-driven platforms compete on interface and speed, they start to look identical to each other. When every app has instant KYC, similar UI, and comparable pricing, the differentiator stops being the technology and starts being distributed to who can actually reach the next hundred million investors, and who they trust enough to listen to.
Colending between banks and NBFCs has grown sharply over the past couple of years precisely because reach and underwriting have started separating from origination. The winners were not the ones with the best models, but the ones with the best last-mile access. I would argue the same logic applies to retail investment and insurance distribution. Regulators, too, are increasingly focused on how products are sold, not just what is sold.
SEBI's recent advisories cautioning investors against unauthorised platforms dealing in unlisted and pre-IPO shares are a case in point a reminder that in high-trust categories, a trained, accountable, regulation-compliant human network is not just a growth lever, it is a safeguard.
Building for both, deliberately
None of this means we are under-investing in AI at InvestKraft. We are doing the opposite, building automation aggressively into everything that does not require a human relationship: fraud detection, document verification, portfolio analytics, and customer support triage.
But we are equally deliberate about where we keep the human in the loop, because that is where the actual conversion, retention, and trust are built in a market like India.
As we prepare for our Pre-Series A round, a significant share of that capital is earmarked for exactly this dual investment deepening our technology stack while continuing to strengthen our agent and partner network, particularly as we push further into Tier-2 and Tier-3 markets.
The BFSI industry's AI narrative has, understandably, been dominated by efficiency. But efficiency without reach is a solved problem chasing an unsolved market. The next wave of India's financial services customers is not going to be acquired through a better app alone. They are going to be acquired through someone they already trust, equipped with better tools. That is the bet we have made since 2022, and it is one I would make again.
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Views expressed by - Dushyant Sharma, Co-Founder & COO, InvestKraft
About the Author
Dushyant Sharma is Co-Founder and COO of InvestKraft, a New Delhi-based fintech platform spanning insurance, lending, and investments, including pre-IPO and unlisted shares under the UnlistedKraft brand.