The Rise of AI Agents Amid a Nasdaq Decline

Rising rates increase the discount applied to companies' future cash flows, acting as a headwind for stock prices. In particular, the Nasdaq, heavily weighted with tech companies, came under downward pressure as the U.S. 10-year Treasury yield hit 5.116%, its highest in 19 years.

Rising rates increase the discount applied to companies' future cash flows, acting as a headwind for stock prices, and the decline was especially sharp for the Nasdaq, which is heavily weighted with technology companies.

The S&P manufacturing and services purchasing managers' index exceeded market expectations, showing the U.S. economy growing at its fastest pace in five years.

This lent weight to Fed Governor Michael Barr's remarks that additional rate hikes are needed to curb inflation, providing justification for the Fed to maintain its tightening stance.

Just as expectations were building for talks between the U.S. and Iran, the Iranian president delivered a hardline message, reversing the situation.

The Iranian president stated that Iran cannot give up its right to develop nuclear technology and cannot allow freedom of passage through the Strait of Hormuz, raising concerns about stalled U.S.-Iran negotiations and pushing Brent crude oil above $100.

Even amid a broad decline among big tech companies, Meta drew market attention by rising 1.93% to 2.4%.

Meta's AI agent 'Muse' is expanding its service ecosystem by announcing integrations with Expedia, Instacart, and others, and even though Amazon blocked Muse, the number of partner companies such as Shopify is growing.

This is the change that will come as consumers can easily cancel unnecessary services such as gym memberships like Planet Fitness or New York Times subscriptions through 'Muse'.

These changes will also affect banks' net interest margin profit structure, suggesting that traditional financial firms could be threatened by personalized AI services.

The insurance market is also likely to change by steering users to switch to products with better terms, which is expected to threaten the profit structures of traditional financial firms such as Charles Schwab.

JPMorgan projected that Meta's 'Muse' will become the most widely used consumer app, citing as a strength its ability to instantly distribute apps using Meta's distribution infrastructure, as with Threads.

Meta used an aggressive strategy of offering 100 million tokens for free to quickly secure market share, which led it to reach No. 1 on the app store. It is expected to generate revenue in the long term through advertising placements and transaction fees.

Increased free usage of Meta Muse could lead to higher inference costs, which could lead to declines in operating profit and cash flow.

In addition, users' low trust in sharing sensitive information such as passwords (only 8% agreed) acts as a significant risk factor. To address these security issues and absorb the payments sector, Meta is attempting to build trust by developing Meta Pay directly.

Goldman Sachs diagnosed that the spread of AI agents could push the subscription software (SaaS) market into crisis.

The logic is that as AI agents handle everything in the middle instead of users using SaaS directly, the raison d'être of SaaS may weaken. Indeed, the CEO of General Mills said that 40% of consumers already use AI tools for food purchases.

Having used Meta Muse directly, I experienced efficiency such as compiling a list of subscriptions and automatically generating cancellation messages for services used infrequently.

Functions were also confirmed for analyzing the costs of various subscription services such as Super Grok and Disney Plus and suggesting better alternatives, and AI agents are expected to emerge as a key theme in the tech sector in the second half of 2026.