Meta's personal AI agent, Muse, is offering a feature that finds subscriptions users have forgotten about or left because it was a hassle and cancels them, prompting subscription-dependent companies to grow nervous, CNBC reported on Sept. 27.

Muse, released this month, can find recurring payments on a consumer's behalf or cancel subscriptions, the report said. Subscription management services have existed for some time, but Muse provides the function through a personal AI agent.

Subscription spending is increasing. A Mastercard and FT Strategies report said 44 percent of U.S. consumers increased subscription spending last year. Average annual spending is $1,887.

Neil Mahoney (닐 마호니), a Stanford University economics professor, said the likelihood of cancellation was about 4 times higher when subscriptions did not renew automatically and consumers had to decide whether to continue.

His research team estimated that subscription companies roughly double revenue because consumers forget to cancel or because the cancellation process is cumbersome. That means AI personal assistants could weaken both factors.

Consumers are already actively cutting subscriptions. ScribeUp, which supplies subscription management technology to bank apps, said members were 1.8 times more likely to initiate cancellations than a year earlier. The number of cancellations increased the most for health and fitness subscriptions, up 3.8 times, followed by video streaming, up 2.2 times.

Jordan Mahclur (조던 매클러), CEO of ScribeUp, said cancellation volumes for a provider can rise by up to 50 percent when subscription fees go up. Before adding AI agent features this year, ScribeUp provided automatic cancellation for a few hundred large subscription services, but it now tracks about 200,000 recurring-payment merchants.

The impact could spread to banks. Torsten Slok (토르스텐 슬록), chief economist at Apollo, said AI assistants could automatically move household cash to accounts with higher interest rates. In that case, banks could lose large amounts of low-interest deposits that fund lending.

Experts stress that subscription companies need to prove value rather than block cancellations. Hiti Chandra Ja (히티 찬드라 자), senior product manager at Zendesk, said the best defense against AI-driven cancellations was not to make cancellations difficult.

Recurly, a subscription management company, said use of a "pause before cancel" feature rose 337 percent, and 3 out of 4 customers who paused returned. Mahclur said if consumers believe they can easily check and cancel recurring payments, they increase total subscription spending.