Personal AI Agents Threaten Companies Profiting From Consumer Inertia - Business Insider
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Your AI agent wants your money back — and that could mean trouble for these companies
By Thibault Spirlet
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Personal AI agents are helping consumers claw back cash — and threatening companies that profit from consumer inertia.
Cheng Xin/Getty Images
Oct 11, 2026, 12:11 PM GMT+2
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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
- 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.