This AI Agent Ends Subscriptions Without a Phone Call

Most personal finance apps have worked the same way for years: a dashboard showing what a consumer spent. The actual decision, whether to cancel a subscription or call to negotiate a bill, is left up to the person.

Rocket Money launched an artificial intelligence (AI) agent called Rowan that helps users carry out that last step. Built in partnership with Anthropic, Rowan monitors a customer’s finances continuously and reaches out by text message the moment it spots an opportunity to save, Rocket Money said in a Tuesday (Aug. 25) announcement.

The company cited an example showing how the tool acts once a customer replies. If someone signs up for a free month’s trial of a streaming service and never uses it, Rowan doesn’t forget. Three weeks later, it texts the customer asking whether they’re enjoying the service or want to cancel before getting charged. If the customer replies “cancel,” Rowan contacts the service, cancels the trial and confirms when it’s done.

The same conversational interface extends to bill negotiation and savings automation. A customer can text Rowan an instruction like rounding every coffee purchase to the nearest dollar and moving the difference into a high-yield savings account, and Rowan sets up that rule to run automatically from that point forward.

ChatGPT Stops at Advice; Rowan Takes Action

Rocket Money is far from alone in the AI-powered financial management space. In May, OpenAI launched a personal finance feature inside ChatGPT that allows Pro subscribers connect accounts through Plaid across more than 12,000 financial institutions. Users can then see a spending dashboard and receive answers grounded in their real account data, PYMNTS reported, with more than 200 million people already asking ChatGPT personal finance questions every month before that integration existed. But ChatGPT’s version stays read-only. It can see balances, transactions and subscriptions and suggest what to cancel, but it cannot move money, execute a trade or pay a bill on a customer’s behalf. Rowan is built specifically to cross that line. Replying “cancel” hands the rest of the process to software with no further oversight after that point.

Rocket Money is betting that consumers who already trust an app to track their spending will also trust it to act on it. That bet lines up with a shift already showing up in PYMNTS data. According to the PYMNTS Intelligence study “The Pay Later Ecosystem Report: Consumers Will Let AI Recommend Pay Later, But They Want Control,” 39% of consumers say they’ve used AI for at least one payment-related task in the past three months, including budgeting and comparing payment methods.

The Real Test Is Whether That Trust Extends to Moving Money

That gap is exactly what PYMNTS Intelligence’s Consumer AI Data Lab tracks in its own research. Thirty-seven percent of power ssers, the most experienced AI adopters, already say a native AI platform is their primary tool for managing finances and banking, PYMNTS reported, and Rowan’s design targets the habit already forming at that end of the spectrum. Power users make up roughly 10% of consumers. Mainstream users, who report using AI for financial tasks at a lower but fast-growing 28%, up from 14% a month earlier, make up another 27%, PYMNTS also found.

Canceling a forgotten subscription is the low-friction end of what Rowan can do. Moving money automatically into savings, or negotiating a bill with a provider a customer never spoke to directly, sits at a different level of trust entirely. Whether the habit Rowan is building with a one-word “cancel” reply carries over to those higher-stakes tasks is the real test ahead.

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