Metas Muse AI agent weighs on financial industry as investors fear competition to human advisors
Meta’s new Muse AI agent is weighing on financial stocks as investors fear the bot could be powerful enough to transform the industry – providing serious competition to human advisors.Leading financial firms Charles Schwab, LPL Financial, Raymond James and Ameriprise Financial fell 0.8%, 1.4%, 0.9% and 1.9%, respectively, by 3:50 p.m.ET Wednesday — as Muse continued to draw plaudits for the array of tasks it can perform since it was released earlier this month.Wall Street banks JPMorgan, Bank of America and Goldman Sachs slumped 0.8%, 0.4% and 2.2%, respectively, also extending declines from the previous day.
JPMorgan and Bank of America are each down about 4% so far this week.Mark White, wealth advisor at Mark White Wealth Advisors, told The Post that investors fear Muse could grow so popular, it could force the financial industry to revamp its entire business model.“Investors are worried that AI assistants could become the first place consumers go for financial information and routine transactions,” he said. “If that happens, banks and other financial firms may have to spend more to reach customers, compete harder on fees and rethink how they deliver service.”Downloads of Meta’s latest AI agent have already soared past rivals like OpenAI’s ChatGPT, Anthropic’s Claude and SpaceXAI’s Grok.Muse was downloaded nearly 1 million times in the six days after its Sept.
8 launch, according to an expert cited by Bloomberg News, and was the top free app in the US on Apple’s AppStore and Google Play as of Monday.The new bot was designed to feel conversational and automatically complete everyday tasks, like cleaning out email inboxes, filling out electronic forms, making purchases online – and even managing personal finances.“The wild fear is that if an AI bot can constantly shop for better rates or move customers to another deal in seconds, customer loyalty becomes a faded memory,” Scott Martin, partner at Kingsview Wealth Management, told The ...