Meta's Muse Triggers Selloff in 'Consumer Inertia' Stocks

Meta's new AI agent Muse dragged down a basket of stocks that Wall Street thinks depend on customers being too busy to shop around, with Bloomberg reporting the S&P 500 Financials Index fell as much as 2.4% on Tuesday to its lowest level since July.

Planet Fitness dropped as much as 11%. Allstate and Charles Schwab each fell more than 5%. Booking Holdings slid 3.9% and Expedia 3.7%. JPMorgan, Morgan Stanley and Wells Fargo each shed more than 2.5%, and European telecoms Orange and BT Group dropped about 4%. Meta itself had jumped 11% the day before as Muse — which connects to third-party services like Gmail and OpenTable to complete digital tasks on a user's behalf — climbed to the top of Apple's US app store.

A Goldman Sachs trading desk note pointed at the mechanism. "As artificial intelligence assistants like Muse and Instinct improve at price comparison, trip booking and dealing with customer service interactions, industries that rely on recurring bills, negotiable pricing and add-ons could come under pressure," the desk wrote. Its named "consumer inertia" basket: AT&T, T-Mobile, Allstate, Progressive, Netflix, Paramount Skydance, Expedia and Booking.

Some investors think the reaction is early. "Right now it's more of a curiosity, but I think two years from now we're all going to have agents," Rhys Williams of Wayve Capital Management told Bloomberg. Citrini Research put the health-insurance angle more sharply: "Tomorrow, you might see something that makes you ask how much money health insurers make simply because people won't sit on the phone for 5 hours trying to get coverage approved."

Muse has driven the loudest thread in our Meta coverage this week, running alongside separate reporting that some of its user calls were routed to human contact-center staff. The market has now added a second story to that one: not what Muse is, but what its existence is supposed to do to everyone else's revenue.