Meta Platform's Muse AI proves that agentic artificial intelligence puts more power into consumers' hands, and that introduces new risks for numerous companies and their stocks.
Meta introduced its consumer AI agent on Sept. 8. Muse is advertised as a personal AI agent that does more than answer people's questions. It can complete comprehensive tasks with minimal user intervention based on simple prompts.
Cantor Fitzgerald analyst Deepak Mathivanan wrote on Tuesday that "Muse by Meta is showing promising signs of driving rapid adoption in the early days." He raised his price target on Meta to $860 from $680 on Tuesday while maintaining an Overweight rating on the stock.
Muse's growing popularity has led Wall Street to worry that agentic AI adoption poses a risk for companies and stocks that rely on consumers who pay for their products or services out of habit or because the payments are automated. Analysts at Goldman Sachs call these "consumer inertia" stocks.
Muse can complete tasks such as looking up recurring payments for a user and canceling subscriptions. Simplifying that process could be a boon for consumers experiencing subscription fatigue, and a problem for companies that benefit from their charges being overlooked or forgotten.
"AI agents such as Muse and Instinct are effectively lowering the friction associated with consumer actions," says Jackson Stone, principal at Neostellar Capital. "The concern getting attention today is that this could be disruptive for businesses that have historically benefited from 'consumer inertia,' whether that's someone continuing to pay for a subscription they don't use, not shopping around for a better price, or deciding that canceling or switching isn't worth the effort."
Some businesses that could be at risk include gym companies such as Planet Fitness, news sites such as the New York Times, insurance providers such as Allstate, streaming services such as Netflix, vacation bookers such as Tripadvisor, and tax filing sites such as Intuit. All of those stocks fell hard on Tuesday and were continuing to trade in the red on Wednesday.
There are already concerns that AI will be a disrupter for certain industries. News companies that rely on people visiting their websites to serve them advertisements have seen a decline in web traffic as chatbots and Google's AI Overviews lessen the need to click through, which could be a problem for their advertising businesses. But the idea that agentic AI could also hurt industries that in the past seemed less exposed to AI risks, such as gyms or streaming services, is a fresher fear.
It shouldn't be all doom and gloom though, Stone says.
"These agents don't just lower the friction associated with canceling or switching, they may also lower the friction associated with purchasing. If an agent can take a consumer from intent to transaction with relatively less effort, that could be a meaningful tailwind for businesses that are well positioned to capture that demand," he said.
Meanwhile, Meta stock was rising while other stocks drop on AI agent disruption concerns. Shares were up 2.2% on Wednesday to $752.62. The stock has gained 22% since launching Muse, while the S&P 500 has declined 0.03% in the same time frame.
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