What are you still paying for that you meant to cancel? I handed mine to an AI assistant: $1,285 a year cancelled so far. The prompt guide for the tedious part of yours.

I’ll bet you’re still paying for something because canceling it has never made it to the top of your day. Getting into the account, figuring out the rules, and dealing with whatever happens next keeps losing to work, dinner, or a child who needs something.

So you keep paying. Your bank statement records a decision that you haven’t really made again in months.

I’m guilty of this too. I asked Muse, Meta’s new AI assistant, to work through my subscriptions. It identified $5,350 a year in subscription spending and, so far, has canceled subscriptions totaling $1,285 a year. I’m still working through the rest. The $5,350 is future spending avoided rather than a cash refund, and it was never a claim that every subscription was waste.

I doubt my situation is unusual. Your number might be different from mine, but the pattern is the same.

The result matters because it is so easy to understand. You don’t need an opinion about model benchmarks to see the value in getting an unwanted charge out of your life. Someone can describe that experience to a friend, and the friend immediately has a job of their own in mind.

I think Muse is a profoundly important launch for exactly that reason. It gives people outside Silicon Valley a reason to care about AI on their own terms. There is something they want done, and now they have useful help doing it. Muse reached the top of the US free iPhone chart ten days after launching on September 8.

When following through becomes easier, more of what you actually want can become a decision. That might mean canceling a service, keeping one you value, organizing a visit, or finally pursuing a plan that has been sitting in your head. The assistant that helps with those jobs gets an unusually valuable relationship with you.

That is how your useful little companion could become Zuckerberg’s next platform. The opportunity begins with your willingness to give it another job.

The thing that makes an assistant useful to you also puts it between you and everyone who wants to sell you something. Amazon worked that out early and locked Muse out of its store.

Here’s what’s inside:

• Your inaction has been valuable to someone. What your unreviewed subscriptions are worth to the companies billing you, and the four ways they respond once that stops working.

• The purchase is decided before the retailer arrives. Amazon runs a $68.6 billion advertising business on being the place you decide. Why it locked Muse out.

• Free use makes sense inside that ambition. How an assistant that costs you nothing pays for itself, and what that does to the advice it gives you.

• Trust has to survive the next recommendation. The tests worth running on anything that earns money when you spend.

• Hand your subscriptions to an assistant. Five copy-paste prompts for Muse, Claude, or ChatGPT that build your list, cancel cleanly, and confirm each charge actually stopped.

The businesses that were counting on you not getting around to it have a problem now. Yours arrives later: the assistant that helped you cancel is going to start helping you buy.