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Transcript

Meta's Free AI Agent Is Cancelling the Subscriptions People Forgot They Had. Meta's Plan to Get Paid Is a Cut of Everything the Agent Buys · Minds, Bodies, and Terawatts

• 0:00
  [Host] This is Minds, Bodies, and Terawatts, the show where your gym finally finds out you quit. CNBC reported on Sunday, September 27th, that Meta's new AI agent, Muse, is going after the money companies make from customers who forget to cancel.
• 0:14
  [Guest] Muse is a free app from the company behind Facebook, and you text it chores the way you'd text a friend. It launched earlier this month, and forgotten subscriptions quickly turned into one of its easiest targets.
• 0:27
  [Host] I probably have a couple of those myself. Is that really enough money for anybody to worry about?
• 0:33
  [Guest] CNBC cites a Mastercard survey that puts the average American's subscriptions near nineteen hundred dollars a year. Most of the subscription businesses in that survey said at least one customer in ten is paying for something they don't use.
• 0:46
  [Host] So somewhere there's a business plan with my forgetfulness written into it.
• 0:51
  [Guest] Neale Mahoney, an economist at Stanford, measured how much. When people are made to choose whether to keep a subscription, they are about four times more likely to cancel. His research estimates that forgetting and hassle together roughly double what sellers take in.
• 1:06
  [Host] Then a good part of what I pay every month is a fee for forgetting?
• 1:11
  [Guest] It is, and an agent doesn't forget or mind waiting in a support queue. Meta told its own conference last week that Muse sat in a cable company's support chat and got eighty-five dollars a month knocked off a bill.
• 1:25
  [Host] I want that. But if it works on cable, what about my bank, where the checking account pays me next to nothing?
• 1:32
  [Guest] Torsten Slok, the chief economist at the investment firm Apollo, went there over the weekend. The average checking account pays a tenth of a percent while online accounts pay three to five percent, and he wrote that agents like Muse could soon move household cash to the better rate automatically.
• 1:50
  [Host] That sounds like nothing but good news for me. Who loses?
• 1:54
  [Guest] The bank does, and Slok thinks it might not stop there. Banks fund their loans with those cheap deposits, and if every household's agent moved the money, he wrote, that would be a problem for the entire financial system.
• 2:07
  [Host] Can Muse actually move my money today?
• 2:09
  [Guest] Nothing announced so far says it can. It reaches your bank through a go-between called Plaid, and what Plaid describes is reading balances and transactions. Slok wrote that it could happen soon, not that it has.
• 2:22
  [Host] Meta is a business, though, and this thing is free. Who is paying for my bill negotiator?
• 2:28
  [Guest] Mark Zuckerberg answered that on stage. He said Meta is keeping Muse free with the expectation that over time it will profit by taking a small fee from transactions.
• 2:38
  [Host] A fee from me, or from the store?
• 2:41
  [Guest] He didn't say, and Meta hasn't said how big the fee is. It also hasn't said how Muse chooses a product when you ask it to buy one, or whether a store can pay to be chosen.
• 2:54
  [Host] Hold on. The agent that ends my forgetting fee could end up collecting a fee of its own?
• 3:00
  [Guest] If I tell an agent to buy paper towels and never look at a shelf, I get the brand the agent picks. So every company that used to compete for my eye now has to win over the agent's owner. The profit from my inattention doesn't disappear, it moves to whoever I hand the shopping to.
• 3:19
  [Host] Are the stores going along with that?
• 3:22
  [Guest] Walmart and Best Buy signed on as partners, and Amazon went the other way. A week ago it blocked Muse with a message calling it an unauthorized AI agent, and it says it had asked Meta to leave its store out first.
• 3:36
  [Host] Is Amazon protecting its customers, or protecting its own checkout?
• 3:40
  [Guest] Probably both, because a wrong order placed by a bot is Amazon's mess to clean up. But Amazon builds automated shopping tools of its own, and an agent that buys for you never scrolls past an ad.
• 3:53
  [Host] Say I download it tonight. What am I handing over?
• 3:56
  [Guest] To do the money chores it needs to read your inbox and your bank transactions. Unless you change a setting, what it sees can be used to train Meta's AI, with identifying details removed, the company says. Meta's own launch post calls that a good default.
• 4:12
  [Host] Then how would I ever know whether it's working for me or for Meta?
• 4:17
  [Guest] I'd ask three questions. Can you see the fee, can you see why it picked what it picked, and can you leave for a rival agent without losing everything this one learned about you?
• 4:29
  [Host] And if the answers are no?
• 4:31
  [Guest] Then the forgetting fee just has a new collector. Mahoney, the Stanford economist, told CNBC that people dropping what they don't want is economics working the way it's supposed to, and that only holds if the agent is easier to quit than the gym was.
• 4:47
  [Host] So I cancel the gym tonight, and I keep an eye on the thing that cancelled it.
• 4:52
  [Guest] For more on who owns the doorway between you and AI, and where the money moves when the friction is gone, head to unscarcity dot ai. The book is on Amazon, the audiobook is on Spotify. This has been Minds, Bodies, and Terawatts.