Your AI agent wants your money back — and that could mean trouble for these companies

Published Sun, Oct 11, 2026

A smartphone displaying the App Store listing for Meta's Muse AI assistant in front of the Amazon website on a computer screen on September 22, 2026, in Shenzhen, Guangdong Province, China — Personal AI agents are helping consumers claw back cash — and threatening companies that profit from consumer inertia.
Cheng Xin/Getty Images

Personal AI agents are coming for one of companies' most profitable customer behaviors: doing nothing.

As personal AI agents make their way into people's financial lives, early users are using them to lower internet bills, recover airline credits, find cheaper insurance, chase refunds, and unearth money they had forgotten was theirs.

Noah Shinn, the CEO of Instinct, one such personal AI agent, touted their saving benefits on an episode of "Invest Like the Best" released last week, saying they can scan users' bank transactions, identify forgotten subscriptions, and cancel them.

"It just sends back the number of what it saved you," Shinn said. Meta has marketed its new agent, Muse, in a similar way.

That could come at a cost to insurers, airlines, banks, broadband providers, and subscription businesses — industries that have for decades benefited, at least in part, from consumer inertia: the millions of people who do not compare the renewal price, dispute the fee, call about the credit, or brave the cancellation maze.

Wall Street has already seemingly begun trading on that thesis. In the two weeks after Muse launched, the share prices of Airbnb and Booking.com dropped 12% and 10%, respectively. Planet Fitness shares dropped 17% over the same period.

No insurer or consumer experts Business Insider spoke to could put a reliable dollar figure on the potential impact. But Tony Soloman, director of insurance intelligence at J.D. Power, said personal AI agents "would certainly be disruptive" for insurers.

"Right now, to actually purchase a policy or make a change, you still need to contact someone, but if AI replaces that, then the carriers lose control over the consumer journey," he said.

Let the bots do the haggling

An advertisement for Meta's Muse is pictured. — Muse, Meta’s personal AI agent.
Smith Collection/Gado/Getty Images

Some early users have already leveraged personal AI agents to make significant savings.

AJ Stuyvenberg, an engineer at Datadog, asked ChatGPT to negotiate with Verizon after Comcast offered him faster fiber internet for $50 a month.

After a little over an hour in Verizon’s live chat, the agent secured a lower monthly bill — $69.99, down from $94.99 — plus a $47.50 loyalty credit. Stuyvenberg said the deal saved him $347.50 over a year.

"It’s nice to use AI to remove some of the sludge from my life," Stuyvenberg told Business Insider.

David Pawlan, who works in growth at Merit Systems, used Instinct to track the price of his United flights, then AgentCash’s StablePhone tool through Claude Code to request travel credits after fares fell.

He said he recovered $73 across three flights in about five minutes each.

"The future of personal assistants will be the ones that can do the painful and proactive tasks for you," Pawlan told Business Insider.

The cost of getting customers to act

Widespread adoption of personal AI agents could pressure businesses that have long benefited from customers not shopping around, disputing a charge, or tackling a convoluted cancellation process.

But the exposure will not be evenly shared. Craig Moffett, a partner and senior analyst at MoffettNathanson, said agents are likely to matter most where prices are hard to compare or suppliers are difficult to identify.

"Real estate, insurance, and financial services all fit the model much better," Moffett told Business Insider.

Insurance may offer the clearest test.

With roughly $560 billion in US auto and homeowners insurance premiums in 2025, if 5% of policyholders used an agent and secured a 10% lower price, about $2.8 billion in annual premiums would be at stake.

But that is a scenario, not a forecast. And the disruption would take far more than a small group of early adopters.

"I don't think 5% to 10% of customers are going to be enough to meaningfully change" companies' economics, Rhys Williams, chief strategist at Wayve Capital Management, told Business Insider. "If 40% to 50% of customers are using agents, then the effects will be noticeable."

Some firms have already paid significant penalties and refunds over such alleged practices, including Amazon, which has issued more than $845 million in refunds as of September under a settlement over allegations that it enrolled consumers to Amazon Prime without consent and made cancellation difficult.

Companies, however, are unlikely to sit back and let AI personal agents do all the bargaining.

Ben Winters, director of AI and privacy at the Consumer Federation of America, said firms could make it harder for consumers and their agents to get through in the first place.

"The companies are always a step ahead in making those processes harder," Winters told Business Insider, pointing to Amazon’s move to block Meta’s Muse agent from shopping on its site for users.

The result could even be an AI-versus-AI battle for customers.

"I would also expect carriers to use AI to help keep ahead of some of these at-risk customers, being more proactive in trying to retain the more profitable business," J.D. Power's Soloman said.