An AI assistant added up my subscriptions: $5,350 a year. The prompt guide to get your own list in about 20 minutes.

Nate B. Jones (0:00)

You probably have a subscription you've meant to cancel, a bill you suspect is too high, or a refund you never found time to chase. You know there's money there. Getting it back means finding the account and reading the rules and maybe spending lunch break with customer support. So another month goes by, and the money keeps getting spent out of your wallet. So I had that problem too. I gave that job to Meta's new assistant, Muse. It found $5,350 a year that I am spending on subscriptions. So far, it's canceled 1,285 of that, which is money I was going to spend in the future by default on stuff I don't use. So yeah, it's kind of good to have it back. And this is what I didn't expect, that the boring job that I just described for you is exactly why Amazon locked it out of the store. Amazon has its own stated reasons, and I'm going to get into them. But I don't think that one of the biggest companies in the world blocks an AI assistant over paperwork. I think it blocks an AI assistant that changes where you spend your attention. Meta shipped Muse on September 8th. Inside two weeks, it has become the number one iPhone app in America. It is being adopted much faster than Chad GPT at this stage. So this video is about two things. Number one, what is it actually like to hand a real life job that saves money to Muse and have it save me the time and the money that it would otherwise take to do that job? And then number two, why does doing that small personal job have one of the largest retailers in the world paying attention? But first, let's get into Muse. Look at the jobs people are already handing over. Chris Abraham said Muse found a book subscription his family had forgotten to cancel and canceled it, checked the refund policy and recovered a year's worth of payments. He doesn't give a dollar figure for that, but it's going to be sizable. The interesting part is that Muse went ahead and pursued and went after that refund. How often do you cancel something and decide arguing about the old charges you didn't intend would take more effort than it was worth? Another early Muse user named Brad, these are all reports that I found around the internet, right? They're publicly available. He reports that Muse spent 98 minutes on the phone with AT&T through multiple transfers while also contacting Verizon and T-Mobile to compare phone offers. He says it spared him more than three hours of calls.

Getting those hours back is something that you can't put a price on. Imagine multiplying that across 100 million people. Now, these phone call stories are early. Reuters has reported that Meta tested having human contractors handle some Muse calls for employees, and the company rolled the experiment back after concerns about disclosure and privacy. And so one of the things that we need to be aware of is that Meta doesn't tell you clearly when another person will receive information and act for you. At the moment, it seems like Muse is saying it handles the calls autonomously, but there's not as much transparency around that as I would like to see. But I view that as an early teething issue. We are going to get to the phone call piece. Meta may have already rolled out that automated phone call piece well enough in many cases, and it just hasn't told that story as clearly as we'd all like to see. And the larger story is around the work saved. For so many of us, the bills, the subscriptions, these problems have existed long before AI models came around, right?

How long have you looked at paperwork and said, I can't do all of this? Or looked at charges and said, I don't have time to investigate this. Or maybe a health bill you can't trust, or haven't had time to get on the phone and call.

And so when you see value there, you can see how that spreads virally. And that's part of why Muse is the number one app in the Apple download store. So another couple of stories. I love these stories because they show concrete value for AI in a way that so many of the stories out of the valley don't. And again, these are all publicly reported. So Joe DeVoy reported thousands in annual car insurance savings because he worked with Muse. Jason Loongo saw an insurance post and tried a similar job while he was at the gym and reported $1,156 a year in savings on insurance. So he was exercising while Muse sorted that out. What we can see in these stories that's really fun is that people are realizing that this is possible, that Muse can save you money. Phone call or not, Muse can save you money. And they're just sharing it around. And Muse is going around and helping each person sort of figure out what works for them with their data to the degree that they're comfortable sharing it. And that's really exciting because it becomes a sort of viral sharing moment of, hey, I got Muse to help me save. Hey, I got Muse to help me save. And I love that because we all could use some dollars back in the pocket. And it extends beyond money too. A parent reports using Muse to combine schedules for four different kids in four sports across four messaging apps in one daily notification.