The human in economics textbooks is diligent and rational. Always hunting for the cheaper option, canceling losing contracts immediately, never paying for services they don’t use. The so-called “rational economic man.”

But real humans are different. According to “Paying Not to Go to the Gym,” published in the American Economic Review in 2006, consumer behavior is hard to explain with the traditional “rational choice” model.

Surveying 7,752 gym members over three years, the study found that members paying over $70 a month attended just 4.3 times a month on average. They could have bought a $10 single-visit pass each time. Instead they paid nearly twice as much per visit. And after their last visit, they went more than two months on average without canceling.

There is a joke that gyms would go bankrupt if people weren’t lazy. Plenty of industries run on human laziness and irrationality.

But that group of industries suddenly started shaking. Planet Fitness, the American gym franchise, fell 9.5% in a single day on September 22, and other subscription businesses Goldman Sachs bundles as the “consumer inertia” sector fell together.

Obviously it’s not that people suddenly became diligent. AI agents just started being diligent for them.

Meta’s new AI app “Muse,” released this month, plans a trip on voice command and books the flights and hotels itself. It buys a watched item when the price drops, monitors for canceled tickets to a sold-out movie, and enters every giveaway it can find. Muse passed ChatGPT to reach No. 1 on the App Store within two weeks of launch, and JPMorgan predicts it could become the most-used AI app since ChatGPT.

One of the trending jobs for this capable assistant is this: “Find the subscriptions I don’t use, cancel them, and pretend to cancel to squeeze out discount offers.” Money paid out of annoyance, or forgetfulness, like Netflix and Amazon Prime, a New York Times subscription, a gym membership, is starting to disappear.

With an AI agent that never finds anything a hassle, humans can finally become true “rational economic men.” That means people start checking bank deposit rates they haven’t compared in years, switch insurance they used to auto-renew without comparison, and cancel subscriptions they never use.

The moat these industries enjoyed was never innovative technology. It was human hassle: “people just don’t bother to move.” When that disappears, pricing power, retention, and customer lifetime value fall with it.

This shift reaches inflation and interest rates too. If companies start offering discounts and competing on price to stop “rational economic man” customers from leaving, this could become the first case of AI lowering inflation.

Falling prices are good for consumers. But Meta didn’t release Muse as charity. There is an old saying: if a service is that useful and still free, the real product isn’t the service, it’s you. Facebook and Instagram are free. But Meta’s real customers aren’t us users. They are the advertisers chasing a user base of 3 billion.

Meta founder Mark Zuckerberg said he will give away massive Muse usage for free, but take a small fee on every transaction made through Muse. If “attention” was the product in the advertising era, “transactions” are the product in the AI agent era. The AI agent that moves diligently for me picks my carrier, my insurer, and my shopping mall for me. The moment you hand your hassle to an AI agent, control over the choice goes with it, and the company that built the agent becomes the tollgate on every transaction path. If it succeeds, giving away AI usage for free is still a lucrative business. Amazon blocking Muse’s access is probably about keeping Meta from reaching that position.

For a long time, buying and selling things was humans’ job. But as transactions through AI agents grow, at some point AI agents will move more money than humans do. If that direction is an inevitable future, even Amazon can’t block AI agents forever. Except for a few brands with fandoms strong enough to beat cost-effectiveness, only products optimized for agents may survive.

If the era of taxing consumer laziness passes, and the era of paying tolls to the AI agent tollgate arrives, investors only need to ask one question. Whose side is that AI agent on, and whose tollgate is it?