The conversation was about personal AI assistants that go through your bills and look for savings. The host had just raised what that could do to banks that rely on idle deposits, and Siegler said subscriptions were an even bigger exposure, including for newsletters like theirs.
Yeah, again, that speaks to just that sort of blank page problem and the Boy of the Ocean problem. They're both like, they sort of push against one another here in this space in particular, because I feel like people are willing to try something out. I mean, you know, obviously dating back to websites and apps and now with AI, people are more than happy to try things out. But the reality is like that very few people, you know, if they don't get some sort of immediate payback on it, like they'll just move on to the next thing because again, there are so many things right now. And so with a product like this, you know, with what Instinct is offering, I feel like it needed to offer something to people right out of the gates. One of the issues with that, which I hit upon, is that the reality here, again, because this is such a broad space where there's so much to be done, I'm not sure that the killer use case is going to be or should be the same for everyone. Whereas before, I may have said, we may have even talked about it previously. I would have said like they should nail like, you know, getting movie tickets or something, you know, that's like a simple, pretty defined use case. But here, I do feel like that maybe instead there should be a focus on, say, doing five to 10 things, some of which will resonate with some user base, some of which will resonate with others, because I don't think it's going to be as simple as sort of just doing one thing really well. I do think you have to do a number of things really well. That said, I still feel like there needs to be the thing that you tell people, oh, yeah, it did this thing for me. And it's sort of the viral word of mouth mechanics. And it gets people both trying out these new products, but also there's a level of trust that needs that's needed for these products, right? And so if you know, you've heard from a friend that they're using this product and that they obviously inherently trust it because they're using it, you're much more likely, I think, to do that. And that matters more so, I think, in this space than it has in other spaces previously. And so you asked for specific use cases. It feels like the thing, and we can go in my specific use cases in a minute, but it feels like the things that you were seeing over and over again and the things that are clearly resonating with people is like, look over either my expenses or look over my credit card bills or look over just a general bill of mine and find out a way to save me money, right? That's always going to be enticing to people, right? Like, is there a way that is there something I'm not thinking about? Like, I have the XYZ credit cards and I'm paying XYZ bills. Like, should I be using this credit card to pay this bill because they give you a discount? Or this one offers this service for free? Like, and again, there's been services that have done sort of these types of things before and plugins and browser plugins and whatnot. But I feel like being able to speak in natural language and coming back to you in natural language, not having to sign up for myriad new services to be able to do this, I think that was at least one of the early hooks that got people like, yeah, we're saving money. This is great.
Yeah, by the way, there's been some a lot of discussion, including from some bankers, about how like basically the banking industry is only solvent because people keep their money in like non-interest bearing accounts. And if these agents could efficiently move money from like cash accounts to safer investment accounts, the arbitrage that banks were doing, for instance, with cash sitting in accounts would cause a massive financial hit to the banking crisis, sorry, to the banking industry. And not only that, you look at things like credit card points and sort of optimizing all these other purchases, loyalty cards. If you hand that over to these agents, that upends so much.
Even worse than that, Alex, is if just like, and others have talked about this, and I feel like this is quickly becoming our reality. Just imagine how many subscription-based businesses are based off of, you know, the fact that people just don't cancel, right? They set it and forget it. And, you know, in the future, if you have an agent, an AI agent who pings you every once in a while and saying, like, hey, I notice you haven't watched, say, HBO Max in a while or Netflix in a while. Like, maybe you just want to not pay for it this month, you know, turn it off for this month. And then if there's something great coming back on, I can let you know and you can turn it back on. You know, that's one very easy one. But even like any subscription service, right? It's like, yeah, you haven't read, you know, you subscribe to this publication or this news. It's a big technology. It's a problem for everyone. For us, that's right. For everyone else and YouTube and all of these things. It's like this is a real, real issue going forward. And I don't know, we're going to have to obviously have a whole new industry that sort of pops up around this and figures out how to optimize these things and keep people incentivized. Do we do more annual contracts? Or things and do we have breakage fees and all that sort of stuff. But there's a lot coming with this.
There's still this sort of open question about whether these things are going to work or not. And I'm reading from the way that you're answering that you think that this is, we've just seen the introduction of something that is going to be this concrete product that many people, millions, maybe billions of people are going to use. Is your belief that this is not like flash in the pan type of product and something that has staying power?
I do believe that at least one and probably a handful of these things will be used by most people going forward from here. I think there's a question of what the timetable is to get this to like mass consumer adoption. And I do think that there is a lot of questions to be answered around some of the stuff we're hitting on with like churn and whatnot, because if the service doesn't do something, you know, that you're sort of looking for, and/or you just more honestly, you just don't know what you should be asking of it. Because again, a lot of people sign up for these things just to try it out. What's the downside of that? I'll just see what it can do. But then after they do like the obvious stuff or the stuff that their friend told them, they're like, well, what else should I be doing with this? And they just have no idea. And so we can get to it in a second. But I think a lot of this will be prompting. And from what I've seen, though, in these early products, I think that they fully understand that. A lot of these companies fully understand that. And they're doing some very smart things to sort of keep users engaged, keep people coming back to try it, to try new things, and to show real value, including with myself. So yes, to answer your question directly, I do think that these things are here to stay this time. I think that I don't know the exact time horizon for mass adoption, like when our parents will be using them, but I do think that they will be increasingly baked into sort of a lot of the AI services that we're already using.
Okay. And, you know, my instinct initially, no pun intended, was to talk a little bit about each one one by one. But I'm going to shift gears a little bit and just ask you to break down the competitive balance and who has the best shot to win. So just to talk through the players, we obviously have Instinct, we have MetaMuse, we have OpenAI's new Dots product, which they just released. We have Grockbot, we have a new product from Microsoft. Let's not go too deep into Google Spark because we're going to talk about why Google missed this moment seemingly after the break. But of the players today, and I don't know if I'm missing any, but those seem like the main ones. Just break down like which personal system is going for what and who do you think comes out on top at the end of this?