AI agents disrupt banks, brokers, and travel booking companies as Meta’s Muse reshapes consumer behavior

TECHNOLOGY

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AI agents disrupt banks, brokers, and travel booking companies as Meta’s Muse reshapes consumer behavior

Meta’s agentic AI tool hit 2.5 million downloads in two weeks, sending shares of major banks and travel platforms tumbling as Wall Street grapples with the death of consumer inertia.

by
Editorial Team

Sep. 23, 2026

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The business model that kept banks and travel platforms profitable for decades can be summed up in two words: consumer inertia. People don’t switch checking accounts because it’s annoying. They rebook on Expedia because the app is already on their phone. Meta’s new AI agent, Muse, is now threatening to do the switching for them.

On September 22, Expedia shares dropped 3.7% and Booking Holdings fell 3.9%. JPMorgan and Wells Fargo each declined more than 2.5%. Allstate and Charles Schwab took it worse, falling over 5%. The catalyst was simple: Muse had crossed 2.5 million downloads in just two weeks, and investors started doing the math on what happens when an AI agent can book flights, compare deposit rates, and execute financial transactions without ever touching a bank’s app or a travel aggregator’s website.

What Muse actually does

Meta built Muse as an agentic AI, meaning it doesn’t just answer questions. It acts. Through an integration with Duffel, Muse can search and book flights across more than 500 airlines, effectively bypassing online travel agencies like Expedia and Booking Holdings entirely. On the financial side, it can compare savings rates, initiate transfers, and handle routine banking tasks that would normally require logging into a portal or calling a branch.

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Accenture’s June 2026 traveler survey found that 87% of consumers are open to working with AI agents on travel decisions. The trust gap, though, is still real: only 10% said they’d let an AI agent handle the actual payment without human approval.

The inertia premium is under siege

McKinsey estimates that if just 10–20% of consumers adopt agent-optimized deposit services, banks could see their net-interest margins compress by 30–50 basis points. That doesn’t sound dramatic until you consider the global deposit revenue pool exceeds $100 billion.

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Wolfe Research estimates the addressable market for AI agents across travel and finance could reach $30–50 billion, representing revenue that currently flows through incumbents but could be rerouted through agent-driven channels.

Who wins, who adapts, who gets left behind

Banks with strong API infrastructure and open-banking capabilities are better positioned to survive in an agent-driven world. If Muse or a competitor can plug into a bank’s systems and offer users better rates through that bank’s products, the bank still earns revenue. It just earns less per customer. Banks that rely on opacity and friction, the ones whose profitability depends on customers not shopping around, face an existential challenge.

Airlines that partner directly with platforms like Duffel may actually benefit from disintermediation, since they’ve long resented the commissions paid to OTAs. Insurance is another sector watching nervously. Allstate’s 5%-plus decline suggests investors see the same dynamic playing out in policy comparison and switching.

For investors, the question isn’t whether AI agents will reshape financial services and travel. It’s how quickly the revenue migration happens, and whether the traditional players can pivot fast enough to capture some of that $30–50 billion opportunity instead of simply losing it.

Disclosure: This article was edited by Editorial Team. For more information on how we create and review content, see our Editorial Policy.