If you live outside the US, you may have missed it: a few weeks ago Meta launched Muse, an AI agent available to American adults through WhatsApp. Think of it as a digital assistant you connect to your email, calendar, notes and social accounts. You tell it what you want in a chat, and it does the work. It can chase a refund for a delayed flight, wait on hold until a human picks up, or act as a personal shopper. Early adoption has been strong, and it shot to No. 1 on the US App Store within two weeks.

Since then, a basket of stocks tied together by the theme of "consumer inertia" has been sliding. The logic goes like this: if Muse can compare prices, switch plans, book travel and sort out customer service problems in seconds, then any business that relies on customers being too busy or too lazy to shop around is in trouble. That puts banks, wealth managers, telecoms, online travel agencies, streaming services and insurers in the firing line.

Whenever the market rushes to pick AI winners and losers, we like to test the idea. First, personal assistants aren't new. In 2015, Facebook launched M inside Messenger to book travel, reserve restaurants and order gifts for you. It never caught on and was shut down in 2018. It turns out people enjoy browsing, comparing and shopping, and a product existing doesn't mean people want it. Second, Meta is currently absorbing enormous computing costs to let people try Muse. Its heavier features sit behind $20 to $100 monthly plans, and we don't yet know how many users will pay.

So, how do you play this? Plenty of companies have been sold off with Muse, some quite unfairly, and we think the market is handing out bargains. Here's the one we're most excited about right now:

This company is what investors call a "share cannibal": it spends most of its cash buying back its own stock. Each share it buys back is retired, so your slice of the business grows without you lifting a finger. It's on track to shrink its share count by more than 5% this year alone, and the lower the stock falls, the more shares each dollar buys back. Meanwhile, revenue is growing at double digits, and we believe its moat is safe from Muse; the market assumes its value comes from price comparison, but it runs far deeper than that.

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