Motley Fool Money - Musings About the Agentic Future

Episode Date: September 23, 2026

Muse has driven Meta Platforms to a nearly $2 trillion valuation and has captured the market’s attention. But how will Meta make money from Muse and who will the other winners in the industry be? Plus, we discuss the competition and whether Amazon sees this as an existential threat. Travis Hoium, Lou Whiteman, and Tyler Crowe discuss:- Muse v Amazon- How Muse Will Make Money- Shopify’s Bet- Expedia on Muse- Who Wins an Agentic Future? Companies discussed: Expedia (EXPE), Meta Platforms (META), Alphabet (GOOG). Host: Travis HoiumGuests: Lou Whiteman, Tyler CroweEngineer: Dan Boyd Disclosure: Advertisements are sponsored content and provided for informational purposes only. The Motley Fool and its affiliates (collectively, “TMF”) do not endorse, recommend, or verify the accuracy or completeness of the statements made within advertisements. TMF is not involved in the offer, sale, or solicitation of any securities advertised herein and makes no representations regarding the suitability, or risks associated with any investment opportunity presented. Investors should conduct their own due diligence and consult with legal, tax, and financial advisors before making any investment decisions. TMF assumes no responsibility for any losses or damages arising from this advertisement.We’re committed to transparency: All personal opinions in advertisements from Fools are their own. The product advertised in this episode was loaned to TMF and was returned after a test period or the product advertised in this episode was purchased by TMF. Advertiser has paid for the sponsorship of this episode.Learn more about your ad choices. Visit ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠megaphone.fm/adchoices Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Is Muse going to break big tech? Motley Fool, Hidden Gems, Investing starts down. Welcome to Motley Fooling Jim's investing. I'm joined today by Lou Whiteman and Tyler Crow. And guys, we've got to talk about Muse the biggest, probably the biggest new app introduction since ChatGPT. I don't think that's too overstating how impactful this has been number one in all of the app stores over the past nearly week.

And meta stock has exploded this week as a result. adding hundreds of billions of dollars in value. So, but this is not, not disruptive to some companies. Not everybody loves the fact that everybody's downloaded Muse and giving it a try. Amazon has blocked Muse from crawling its website. So it doesn't seem like all these big tech companies are playing all that nicely. But Lou, what I wanted to start with is how is Muse changing the way that we're potentially interacting with some of these companies?

Because we've been talking about aggregators and the apps that we use all the time, All these big tech companies have been playing nice for a really long time. Muse comes in, gain some popularity, and suddenly everybody goes, whoa, whoa, whoa, do we really want to change the status quo? The question of how things have changed, we will see, I think. I mean, I think it's way too early to say it. But look, everybody played nice before because they were all chasing different things. Now they're beginning to chase the same thing.

So, yeah, they're playing less nice. I mean, we are so early stages here, though. I don't know what we can really draw in about anything as far as what's going on. But definitely, look, Amazon is, Amazon loves being the biggest thing in e-commerce. If someone's going to come in and try to take some of what they're doing from them or kind of take some of their secret sauce, they're going to push back because this is the first time they've had to.

Tyler, this does seem like an interesting place where there is now frenemies forming in this ecosystem where Muse can go out and shop every website, but now we're starting to get some of these sites blocked like Amazon, Some are going, hey, let's work together. PayPal. We'll talk about some of these partnerships in a moment with Shopify, PayPal. But do you think that something like Will's Muse will actually change the way that we shop? Because if it does, then that's a potential threat to Amazon who makes actually more than 100% of its profit off of advertising. I mean, that's the thing that you open up Amazon today, search for anything.

You're going to see a whole bunch of ads. That's the business model. The business model for meta is ads on its social network, but if we're suddenly shopping for stuff with an AI assistant, it seems like both of those business models are potentially going to change. You probably brought two of the more cynical voices when it comes to this sort of stuff onto the show today. So great choice on that.

One of the things I'm thinking about this too is, you know, thinking about the business models is for meta, it's not necessarily like, oh, we're going to go change shopping. at least the way that they have presented Muse so far to the public is it seems more like a way of just capturing more information. You know, you look at the way that they've done meta glasses and this has gone out. Muse itself is an extremely popular app. But also, there is something to be said of the reason that it is so popular is because the token limits are for free versus pay tiers. Suggest that meta is really just like, we want to almost give this thing away.

I think that they're saying like 100 million tokens before you actually get into a pay tier, which I, you know, relying on it constantly saying I have still not hit that limit. Yeah. And it's something like, you know, multiple novels worth of like language texts that can be entered before you actually start hitting those sort of limits. And when you think of it that way, it's like, well, it doesn't really seem like they're trying to push for paid tiers. they're trying to gather as much information as possible. And shopping is obviously part of that. It's one could argue that it's part of like, you know, meta's social media empire. They don't get as much information on the shopping side.

So that certainly gives them that aspect. Again, whether this is a game changer for meta, I don't know. Maybe it just is supplementing the status quo of more information to sell more ideas. But here's where I come back to it. Because as you said, we're running into walled gardens. Amazon's like, no, we're not going to let Mews do this. I can imagine that Google would or Alphabet would do the same for YouTube and Google

because they have these walled gardens of advertising. We don't want our competitors being able to scrape our information for this. This is ours and it makes our data more valuable when it's not democratized to the world. And then it starts to come to the user experience where it's, like, okay, well, I need an AI agent from meta. I need an AI agent from Amazon. And then all of a sudden, I've got four or five different agents. Do I need to bundle my agents again?

Man, that almost sounds like streaming services all over again. That's probably a good analogy that this amazing technology, but the business model on how this is going to play out, the other thing, Lou, that I think we need to think about as investors is we get really excited about the new thing, the popular thing. You can go back through the history of artificial intelligence. and there was an image creation app that went from zero to like $100 million in revenue

in a matter of weeks, and now I can't even remember the name because it's completely irrelevant. Even ChatGPT was supposed to disrupt Google's entire business, search. Is there an end game here that is something like Muse is going to fundamentally disrupt? tech and the way that we interact with technology, or is this going to be much more of a slow burn, which is, I think, for Normie's kind of the way that this has played out so far.

Yeah, and we can get this more in a second, but yeah, it is a slow burn. Everything that we think, we have declared the winner probably half a dozen times here, right? And it's always been different guys. So I don't think we know anything. I tend to agree with Tyler on especially meta. I don't give the benefit of doubt for data harvesting. But I do think the kinder view of what they're doing right now given away is the land and expand, just trying to get market share because it is so new.

They can't get people to pay for it right now because nobody knows they want it yet. And we'll see if they really want it. But yeah, we are early days. This is the new big thing because it is better today. That's not to say someone else won't come back with somebody else tomorrow. Where does it end? The end game is one of these things becomes so good that the Amazon. Amazon's in the world can't block it because they're costing themselves business or there's

just a dominant player that you had like the same way Apple got the Apple tax with the app store. You just needed to be there. We're a long ways off from that. And I don't think, and anyone who tells you they know who the winner is is just trying to sell something. Travis, I almost want to offer a third option because you gave like pivotal moment versus slow burn. It seems like we're having these game changing moments like all the time these days to the

point where they're just kind of commoditizing the game-changing aspect of it. And perhaps it's to this point where the speed at which it moves so fast, the rapid, you know, slide down the cost commodity curve and the commoditization of this, that it is really hard to have a standout pivotal moment because it is moving so quickly. Yeah, and it's really hard to see what is sustainable in this market as well. I do want to talk about some companies that have a big opportunity ahead of them, including Shopify, will do that in a moment. Introducing Fidelity Trader Plus, the next generation of advanced trading from Fidelity. Customize your tools and charts and access them seamlessly across desktop, web, and mobile.

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Try the all-new Fidelity Trader Plus. Learn more about our most powerful trading platform yet at Fidelity.com slash traderplus. Investing involves risk, including risk of loss. Fidelity brokerage services LLC, LLC, member NYSE, SIPC. Welcome back to the show. We did have some interesting partnerships with Mews. So Amazon taking a little bit of an adversarial approach to Mews, but Shopify, PayPal, Expedia, have said, hey, if you want to use our products, connect to us, we're more than happy to work with you. So, Tyler, are these opportunities, we talked about some of the wall.

gardens. And I think that's an interesting way to frame this is Amazon is a walled garden. They want you to go to Amazon and shop there. If you're going to a Shopify shop, they don't necessarily care whether you came from Muse or you came from Facebook or you knew which website to go to. As long as you're coming to their site, that's a win for them. So it almost seems like some of these business models are going to be very conducive to opening up and saying, hey, Muse, chat, GPT, whatever Google comes out with, we're happy to be partners with you. There is a world in which some of this can pull some discretionary spend away from Amazon. If uptake of this is so popular and everyone decides to cede all of their life and shopping decisions to Muse or some other non-Amazon, non-alphabet, non-exclusive sort of agent that would benefit a company like Shopify. That is to say, a Shopify or a PayPal or any of these aren't building their own products. I don't know. Maybe there was some sort of like, they try. to build their own, they saw it wasn't working.

It's like, maybe we just partner with somebody. Might be a heck of a lot easier to have some sort of aggregator above us. But at the same time, it's pretty a low cost sort of thing. Like, all they have to do is sign on the dotted line with Muse and go, hey, yeah, we'll partner. The opportunity costs here seems pretty low. So I don't want to say it's like picking up a few dimes on the floor, but it does benefit, but I wouldn't necessarily call it like a game changer to the investment thesis in any of the companies mentioned.

I mean, what Tyler says is exactly right. And this is not just unique here. Every one of these product launches, there are, there's a whole page of partners and all that. And there is very little downside to these partners. There's nothing to go in. It sort of reminds me of, you know, we were talking not too long ago about Jobi and Archer and all of the companies that did refundable deposits for a thousand aircraft.

There's no downside to being there on day one. The takeaway for investors is, be careful, don't read much into that. If Muse turns into something, it could turn into something. But in terms of guarantees or endorsements, what the revenue means, what it means for these businesses, how things evolve, it's not worth the paper. It's printed on. So Meta's stock jumping 9%, maybe a bit of overreaction short term. Lou, I did want to get your thoughts on some of these changing business models.

because as we think about some of the other companies in tech, and Expedia is one of the ones that was announced as a partner yesterday. Uber is always the one that I always think about because it's sort of a similar aggregator position. But thinking about Muse, if you're going to do travel search with Muse, sure, you could go through Expedia, but if Muse is a really smart AI, why can't it just go straight to the website,

which is essentially what Expedia was doing, was being a discovery engine for hotels, you know, for airlines, things like that, is that a good way to think about that, that maybe they're coming at this kind of from a point of weakness where they just don't want to be out of the game at all. Whereas Uber, I always think about, is this really just something that will be disruptive to Uber? Those drivers still have to connect with somebody

and have to work for some sort of application that's going to connect them. Are they going to connect directly to Muse? Probably not. So something like an Uber sitting in the middle, maybe it doesn't have the same aggregator position, but it is at least some sort of valuable position that can't be just completely cut out by just going directly to a person's website saying where they are.

Is that a good way to think about this competitive dynamic as we kind of go down from who may see tail wins from Mews short term, but maybe isn't in a strong position long term? I want to push back on everything you said because I did. Of course you do, Lou. Back to what you said about meta, I actually think the 10% stock jump makes sense because the market is always pricing,

in the future. It didn't double. It didn't say it's guaranteed. But if Mus is onto something, this is powerful. So seeing it come out and seeing the investors get excited about it, again, it's not for today. It's not something I'm chasing, but that makes sense. I also don't really see a difference between Expedia and Uber long term in this. I think that the promise of these agents is more direct commerce and destroying the middlemen. And yes, for now Uber is better protected because the airline websites are set up. But there is no reason why a driver wouldn't be incented to come up with a new system

where they're available to some smart agent if it means that you don't have to pay Uber their fee. So long term, I would be very careful assuming one middleman makes it and another doesn't because the whole point of this is to relieve the friction and get rid of the middleman. When we come back, we're going to talk about where there's potential hidden opportunities

in this agentic future. You're listening to Motley Fool, Hidden Gems, Investing. Introducing Fidelity Trader Plus, the next generation of advanced trading from Fidelity. Customize your tools and charts and access them seamlessly across desktop, web, and mobile. For faster trades, anywhere you go. Try the all-new Fidelity Trader Plus. Learn more about our most powerful trading platform yet at Fidelity.com slash Trader Plus. Investing involves risk, including risk of loss.

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rippling.a-I-I-S-F-L. Welcome back to the show. Okay, Tyler, where are there some hidden gems here? I mean, Meta's one of the biggest companies in the world, almost a $2 trillion valuation. Is that still a sort of underappreciated gem or there are other areas that you're looking if muses and shopping agents are going to be successful? Yeah. So as I'm thinking about agentic, AI. I actually have more doubts about it from a, like, an individual consumer level, because it will help in some ways, but I think that it doesn't have as much power with discretionary spending because people tend to buy things on a whim and some, even think of like the most basic things of like a T.J. Max or a raw stores where the actual in-person experience is still like a thing

as ancient as that may sound. And I thought we were going to have so much extra time for those in-person things now that agents are doing all of our work for us, but maybe not. Well, one should hope so. But I actually think there's going to be a little bit more opportunity in this agentic commerce on the B-to-B side rather than from the individual consumer perspective. It just seems like a more appropriate outlet for this. You have, you know, purchases are made on regular schedules where inventories are closely monitor and often digitized. Like, all that data is there versus, you know, somebody, you know, on a consumer level just like pops in my head one day,

hey, I want to go to the movies or something like that. It just seems like that automation, regular cadence, it would take stuff off of someone's plate at a business. Those are the sort of things where it's going to make a real difference. Now, we talked about big agentic AIs, but I think there's actually more value in some of these real niche products that not necessarily these big companies are thinking about. And I want to bring one company to the table here.

It's within the hidden gem service. It's called AAR Corp. This is really deep in the playbook here. It's a parts distribution and enterprise resource planning software company for commercial aircraft and military aircraft. I mean, that's like apples to apples for hidden gems, don't you think? Exactly. So what they're building right now is actually agentic AI capabilities into their ERP systems that are going to basic, to take away a lot of the inventory planning for,

its commercial airline customers. So say, like, Delta is like, hey, we need some, you know, new, instead of like routinely scheduling actuators for its landing gear, their AI ERP software is going to handle it. It's built on AAR system who also happens to distribute those parts. Bing, bang, boom. It's saved a lot of people headaches. It's also starting to predict those sort of things, knowing, like, the schedules on which these things sort of break.

I think things like that are going to make those kind of companies, immensely valuable to their customers versus this absolute knife fight that we're going to have with the Muse Agenic AI companies and the alphabet Agenic AI trying to take every last shred of our data to try to figure out what we want when half the time we don't even know what we want. So I really do think it's going to be these niche, niche companies working in very esoteric areas that could generate immense value from this Agentic Commerce sort of revolution. On the consumer side, it is fun to think about. The LG introduced the smart refrigerator in June of 2000, 2,000, guys, 26 years.

26 years ago. And how many of us are letting our appliance handle our grocery list every week? Okay. Now, you could say, but Lou, now that the AIs here can do that, but that is, I think, something to reflect on about consumer adaptation. The difference with B2B, as Tyler's noting, is there's more of a regular cadence. I don't want to eat the same meal every day, every week. So, you know, but an airplane needs this many parts.

So I do think it's more there. On the consumer side, this is somewhere between glorified search and an imaginary friend who makes decisions for you and pays for them without you knowing it. I am probably more on the glorified search side, but I do think there is ways where this can become the new big thing and it does eat into the search business, the way we've all been talking about forever. It's going to take a lot of time. The only urgency is podcasts, analysts, media, stuff like they're saying,

is this the new big thing today? The reality is this is going to take a generation to play out, if not longer. And I think there's a lot of opportunities. Do you know what's going to be one of the more fun stories to follow with, like, individual, agenta commercial AI is when AI has been like thinking about your spending habits and how they can make you more efficient and maybe save money? There's just going to be a ton of local news stories of like somebody had a pallet full of tuna cans sent to their house because their agentic AI commerce thing said, you buy a lot of tuna. Let's save some money and buy it by the palate.

That's such a dystopian future, Tyler. Okay, Lou, final word here. The silliest dystopian feature. Exactly. Can Google fast follow what works? Because I think we mentioned this on one of the shows last week. I tried out muse. And the first thing it is was connect all of my Google stuff.

Google also owns the operating system for more than half of the smartphones in the world. Is this an area where Muses the thing of the day? It is very impressive. I'm not taking that away from meta at all. But if Google does this okay enough, they can actually be a winner because the vast majority of people are not going to adopt this in the next two weeks. They're going to take the next two years. And by then, Google is going to kind of be there and do it for you. right on your phone.

I have good news and bad news for the alphabet bowls. Good news is, yes, they can copy this and they can win because they already have the connections, definitely. The bad news is what meta has shown us is almost anyone can copy this. And so it's quite possible someone other than alphabet or meta will simply do it better. Maybe Apple. I don't know. But so, yeah, I don't think, I mean, the only honest answer is we do not know what, who's the

winner will be in five years. We shouldn't read too much into today and we shouldn't assume anything. Definitely a lot for us to cover in the future. As always, people on the program may have interest in the stocks they talk about and the Motley Fool may have four more recommendations for or against, so don't buy ourselves stocks based solely on what you hear. All personal finance content follows the Model Fuel's editorial standards and is not approved by advertisers.

Advertisements are sponsored content and provided for informational purposes only. To see our full advertising disclosure, please check out our show notes. For Lou Whiteman, Tyler Crowe, and Dan Boyd behind the glass. I'm Travis Hoyam. We'll see you here tomorrow.