My position: I own Meta (META), which is mentioned in this column, and I hold other positions that aren't discussed here. I don't own Schwab (SCHW), Robinhood (HOOD), or LPL Financial (LPLA). I am not a financial advisor, and nothing here is investment advice.
Key points
- An insurer kept hanging up on Muse's AI calls
- Meta offered human-assisted calling to half its employees
- Schwab fell 6.1% as put volume jumped
- The real test for Schwab is whether cash moves
Traders spent Tuesday betting that Meta's (META) new AI agent, Muse, will take business from Charles Schwab (SCHW). The same day, Reuters reported that Meta had tested human call-center workers to handle some Muse requests. One employee said his insurer kept hanging up when it heard the caller was AI.
Schwab closed down 6.1%. And I can't stop thinking about the call center.
The AI agent got an assistant
Meta launched Muse on September 8 as a personal agent that, in the company's words, "doesn't just answer questions, it actually does the work." We covered the launch and how Muse works at the time. One of the things it can do is call US businesses for you, to book a haircut, check whether a store has something in stock, or get a quote from a contractor.
That's where it ran into trouble. According to internal posts seen by Reuters, one employee said he tried calling his insurance company and "they keep hanging up on Muse when they hear it is AI." So Meta turned on what it called "human agent calls" for half of its employees. The post announcing it said, "Muse is now able to hand requests to a trained agent, who places the call and works it through."
A Meta vice president wrote that tests showed human callers could get the success rate up to 95% to 98%, versus a lower rate for AI calling. She also said Meta was still "hillclimbing AI calling," which I'm going to start using when my own calls don't go well.
So the personal assistant that does the work for you needed its own assistant.
Reuters described an internal test available to employees. One employee reported that a contractor made a racist reference during a call to negotiate a cable bill. The vice president said "it was a miss" to start without proper disclosures and that Meta had "rolled back this feature" for now. A spokesperson told Reuters the company "will only roll it out when it's ready and with the proper disclosures."
Meanwhile, the Schwab trade
On the other side of the trade, Schwab closed Tuesday at $100.35, down 6.1%, and it's now down 8.2% from its last close before Muse launched. LPL Financial (LPLA) fell 7.5%. Robinhood (HOOD) closed up 0.8%.
Schwab options volume ran more than five times the average, with nearly twice as many puts traded as calls, CNBC reported, citing Cboe LiveVol data. The most popular contract was a January $90 put, with a strike about 10% below Tuesday's close.
It wasn't only brokers. Bloomberg reported that banks and insurers also sold off on Tuesday over the same Muse worry, and CNBC noted that higher interest rates may not be helping the group.
Where I push back
Muse doesn't trade stocks. Meta's launch post doesn't mention brokerage, investing, or banking at all. CNBC reported that Meta's AI assistant says it won't trade for users or give financial advice, though it'll describe how it could track investments and analyze how a portfolio fits together.
The question is whether those capabilities will change what Schwab customers do with their money.
Now, the bears aren't making everything up. Piper Sandler analyst Patrick Moley wrote in April that "Schwab's reliance on low-yielding sweep cash puts it squarely in the crosshairs." That's a real argument. If AI makes it easy for customers to move idle cash somewhere that pays more, Schwab earns less on that cash. Moley made that case five months before the Muse agent launched. That threat doesn't require Muse to trade stocks or get an insurer on the phone. It only needs to make customers pay attention to what their cash earns. What's missing is evidence that Muse is getting Schwab customers to move that money.
I'll also give Muse its due. It has more than 2.5 million downloads, according to Sensor Tower data cited by Reuters, and Meta's stock is up more than 20% since launch, as we covered in our report on the Muse rally. There's clearly interest in trying it.
Schwab isn't ignoring any of this either. On September 14, Schwab Advisor Services announced it's working with Anthropic to bring Claude to the independent advisors on its platform.
I'm watching how Meta brings calling back, including how much of the work goes to people. But for Schwab, the test is whether Muse gets customers to move idle cash into higher-paying accounts. That could hurt. A call-center experiment doesn't prove it will happen, and a bad phone call doesn't prove it won't. Before I buy the bear case, I want to see the money move.
