The credit repair industry is notoriously scammy and difficult for consumers to navigate. An AI-powered ChatGPT app could provide a transparent, automated alternative by connecting to credit bureaus, offering dispute templates, and simulating score improvements. This model can be applied to other opaque consumer service industries.
Generative AI primarily changes an app's user interface, but agentic AI can bypass UIs entirely to complete tasks. This makes transaction-fulfillment apps, which constitute a huge portion of the market, vulnerable to being replaced by agents that act directly on a user's behalf.
By eliminating outdated constraints like the six-month activity rule and incorporating time-series data and alternative inputs like rent payments, modern credit scoring models can assess millions of creditworthy individuals, such as military personnel or young people, who were previously unscorable.
While the industry obsesses over automating inbound support calls to businesses, the real disruptive opportunity may be on the consumer side: personal AI assistants that make calls on a user's behalf. This flips the script, creating a race to aggregate consumer demand and interact with businesses.
Insurers use AI to auto-deny claims and require tedious phone calls for appeals. Lunabill provides hospitals with an AI voice bot to automate these calls. This creates an arms race where one company's AI will inevitably negotiate with another's, foreshadowing a future where many adversarial B2B processes become fully automated AI-to-AI interactions.
Traditional software automated standardized processes but struggled with complex human interactions like call center support. Generative AI's ability to understand natural language allows software to automate these nuanced tasks, dramatically expanding the total addressable market by tackling problems that were previously impossible to solve with code.
To enable agentic e-commerce while mitigating risk, major card networks are exploring how to issue credit cards directly to AI agents. These cards would have built-in limitations, such as spending caps (e.g., $200), allowing agents to execute purchases autonomously within safe financial guardrails.
To penetrate tech-resistant markets like personal injury law, the winning model is not selling AI software but offering an AI-powered service. Finch acts as an outsourced, AI-augmented paralegal team, an easier value proposition for firms to adopt than training existing staff on new, complex tools.
The most effective application of AI isn't a visible chatbot feature. It's an invisible layer that intelligently removes friction from existing user workflows. Instead of creating new work for users (like prompt engineering), AI should simplify experiences, like automatically surfacing a 'pay bill' link without the user ever consciously 'using AI.'
While many focus on AI for consumer apps or underwriting, its most significant immediate application has been by fraudsters. AI is driving an 18-20% annual growth in financial fraud by automating scams at an unprecedented scale, making it the most urgent AI-related challenge for the industry.
Instead of simply automating jobs, ZocDoc's AI redesigns the entire patient intake process. It triages calls, routing simple queries to an AI and complex ones to the most qualified human specialist. This transforms a cost center into a highly efficient system that improves the patient experience.