Good morning everyone…

Personal agents are here in a major way, the subject of today’s disucssion.

Eddie

Some of you might have heard about Facebooks new AI agent and personal assistant - Muse. If you haven’t, you probably will soon. It’s quickly sky rocketed to the number one downloaded app on the app store.

I know some (at least one) of you absolutely despise facebook and mark zuckerberg. But put that aside, I already found a nice little personal finance use case.

If you let it, it will connect into your various apps, including email, so it can provide personalized actions. I have done this. I call him Jimmy.

I gave Jimmy this prompt: “act as my subscription auditor: scan my inbox for every recurring charge, list what I pay, when it renews, and what i have actually used in the last 90 days. Cancel anything untouched for three months and show me my new monthly total”.

The results were impressive. It found every, single, recurring payment, both personal (spotify, netflix, etc) and work (newsletter, office rent), including those annual subscriptions that you forget about (costco/amazon prime), as well as recurring donations.

Unfortunately, nothing on my list do I want to cancel, nor found anything forgotten that is unused. That’s because I’ve made this a habit for some time - see The Goodwill Investing Journal - Issue #14 - Your Subscriptions Are Killing You.

I have since gone on and directed it to be my personal CFO, more details on that next week.

That Muse could do this in a matter of minutes, was impressive to say the least. Apparently, it’s coordinated enough to actually cancel them for you.

Anyway, for those of you that haven’t done a subscription audit, you should. I’m quite confident you’ll find some waste (unless you’ve been subscribed since April 2024 when Issue 14 was published).

And since letting Muse Jimmy access your personal data might be controversial, then do it manually. Download 12 months of bank statements, comb each one with a highlighter, identify what is recurring, what you use, what you’ve forgotten about, and what you can toast.

However, call me crazy, but I tend to think the scare around giving agents personal access is similar to how people reacted 20 years ago to putting credit card details on the internet.

PS. once the spending side is sorted, the next step is putting your money to work. That’s what the Simply Investing Masterclass is all about; indexing investing, accounts, where, when, how, and why.

Mark Zuckerberg’s thinking he’s back!

With the release of Muse, it has created quite a lot of fan fare among users but also wall street. The stock shot up 14% this week and, interestingly, there’s been simultaneous fallout in many recurring revenue names. As the Los Angeles times put it: Meta’s new AI agent rattles banks, insurers, and travel stocks.

While it’s impossible to say what moves stocks on any given day, analysts on wall street are theorizing that Muse’s quick access to >3 billion facebook users in the form of a personal assistant that can kill unnecessary subscriptions on their behalf (or book travel, audit insurance, banking services), many of the subscription model business out there may be in for some customer retention issues.

“As artificial intelligence assistants like Muse … 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”, Goldman Sachs Group Inc.’s trading desk said in a note.

Some of the household names affected this week include: Netflix, Expedia, AirBnb, Allstate, also JP Morgan, Wells Fargo and Charles Schwab.

Anyway, personal agents acting on behalf of the consumer is going to be profound. Companies that used psychology to influence human behaviour will have to go through someones personal agent first. A whole new economy as well as a new set of rules companies will have to play by is coming soon to a theatre near you.

Of course, we have yet to see what Chat GPT and Claude will release next. In the age of AI, a new idea seems to be easily copied about two weeks later.

Perhaps the only difference this time, is that Facebook has almost half the planet as a customer already.

For what it’s worth, I am long Facebook.

….it’s 2.65% of the S&P500 🙂

“If life gives you limes, make margaritas”

—Jimmy Buffett

Where are you on the AI topic?

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