Hi there! My name is Janko Roettgers, and this is Lowpass. In this newsletter: A closer look at the impact AI agents like Meta’s Muse could have on subscription services.

When Meta’s chief AI officer Alexandr Wang took the stage at Meta Connect to introduce the company’s Muse AI agent last month, he touted Muse’s abilities with a few examples of how people have been using it during beta testing. These included Muse agents booking weekend getaways, hunting for rare products online and saving money on car insurance. And then there was this:

“One person had it negotiate with their cable company through their online customer support chat, and it knocked $85 a month off the bill.”

If you’re an AI-curious consumer looking to save some money, this sounds like a great idea. You may not be ready to hand an AI agent the keys to anything too consequential. No one wants to lose their home or health insurance because a buggy AI agent decided you’d save money without it. But renegotiating your entertainment subscriptions, and perhaps culling a few you haven’t been using? That’s exactly the kind of low-stakes, high-reward scenario AI agents are made for.

If you’re running a subscription service, you may have very different feelings about this – especially considering that Meta’s Muse app has been downloaded an estimated 10 million times since its release a little over a month ago. And those ten million users aren’t just trying Muse once: The app’s seven-day retention rate is 30 percent, according to Sensor Tower. In terms of retention, Muse is already outpacing rival AI apps from OpenAI, Anthropic and xAI.

This uptake could have massive consequences for subscription businesses, believes Bango’s VP of marketing Giles Tongue. “Over 20 percent of people are prepared to let agents make decisions for them about their subscriptions, and what they're paying for,” Tongue says, referencing data the company collected for one of its recent reports. “If you're a commodity product, then you've just become even more commodity.”

It doesn’t take much to imagine AI agents having a massive impact on subscription businesses. In a 2025 Cnet survey, 61 percent of respondents said that they’re rethinking their subscriptions because of the state of the economy – and that was before the average price of gas hit $4.26 a gallon. What’s more, respondents reported that they’re spending an average of $17 a month on subscriptions they don’t use.

“This is dealing with inertia,” says Tongue. “You get to the end of the contract, and you probably don't even notice you missed the email. You just let it roll over. If businesses are reliant in some way (on inertia), then that may be money that doesn't come to them anymore.“