A wave of selling hit software, banks, and insurers because AI assistants are starting to break the habits those businesses quietly profit from — bad for anyone holding "sticky" subscription and fee-based companies.

• Meta's new AI assistant, Muse, triggered the drop, with gyms, news sites, brokers, insurers, and travel sites all falling hard in one day.
• The idea: these companies make money because people forget to shop around, and an AI agent will now do the shopping for them.
• Banks, brokers, and insurers got hit because an agent can spot a customer earning nothing on their cash or overpaying on a policy and move them.
• Design and productivity software looks most exposed, since AI now does in hours what used to take a designer weeks.
• Winners look like Robinhood, Apple, Palantir, and the AI makers themselves, plus anything protected by government contracts.

Outlook: The fight shifts from who has the best AI model to which app people actually open, and until that's clear software stocks stay jumpy.