The most striking analysis to come from the debut of new consumer-focused AI agents isn’t about what they can accomplish right now, which is impressive enough. Rather, it’s all the different ways they might profoundly alter consumer behavior.
Take banking. As Apollo chief economist Torsten Sløk wrote in a blog post on Sunday, AI agents such as Meta’s Muse (META) could redirect household cash, which is typically stored in tepid checking accounts, into other accounts that pay upwards of 5%. (Disclosure: Yahoo is a portfolio company of funds managed by affiliates of Apollo Global Management.)
“If every household used AI agents to optimize the return on their cash balances, banks could lose a large share of the cheap deposits they rely on to make loans, which would be a problem for the entire financial system,” he wrote.
The stark example of potential disruption, with the arresting headline “Is an Agentic Bank Run Coming?” encapsulates just how much other companies, industries, and ways of doing business stand to lose once certain tasks become not just automated but intellectually outsourced to an LLM hitched to your computer.
Nearly every single administrative or customer service-based behavior or activity is performed through an interface or series of logins. What people perceive as hard or tedious corporate hassles means customer inertia that translates into very real profits.
That worked for decades. But the death of friction could mean curtains for all companies that depend on psychological barriers to keep customers locked in: gyms, telecommunications companies, and many more subscription-based parts of the services industry.
If AI agents can sweep cash from your brick-and-mortar bank paying peanuts to an online high-yield savings account, just imagine how it can sand down all elements of hassle. The new contract to consider, a number to call, a new form to fill out, data to re-enter, files to transfer, menus to re-learn, and on and on the list goes. (How many times have you helped your parents set up their TV or phone?)
Agents, if they’re taken seriously and perform well, do away with all of that without having to sign up for some third-party specialized service like RocketMoney. (Your parents will still need your help, though, and this will also deal a blow to companies like RocketMoney that do this already.)
As new corporate SEC filings pop up, we’ll be looking to see whether “risk factors” sections get updated post-Muse. We may be pretty good at imagining how AI can smooth over this stuff, but no one is better at imagining a corporate existential crisis than the companies’ lawyers themselves.
Hamza Shaban is a reporter for Yahoo Finance covering markets and the economy. Follow Hamza on X @hshaban.
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