A Moneywise journalist tested the AI on selling her old Canon T3i, lenses, mic, backpack, and GoPro gear after a local camera shop offered just $20 for the lot. The AI found exact-match eBay sold comps ($220-$225), located a Foto Care cash-buy event in NYC, and wrote a negotiation brief with opening, target, and walk-away prices to counter lowball offers.
Eric's Dot tracks a phone trade-in that shipped weeks ago and still has not credited, submitted the itemization for a reimbursement claim stuck in review, and keeps standing watches, including a comedian's New York dates and an artist's rumored return, reporting back when something lands.
The AI pursued a refund for a defective product by claiming on the extended warranty attached to the user's Amex card, rather than the retailer's return window.
A Dutch man brought his own AI assistant, Eva, running on the AI, into a live call with his provider Ziggo. Eva had compared a rival offer against his contract, and spoke during the call when he asked her a question. Inside 30 minutes he had a renewed 24 month contract that cuts his total bill by 1,250 euros.
The AI makes his listings for eBay and Facebook Marketplace and researches what similar items sold for. He approves the price before anything goes live and sends the photos himself, which he says keeps the listings honest.
A value investor had the AI recreate the spreadsheet he built by hand last year covering every warrant on the NYSE and Nasdaq. The AI looked up strike prices and redemption prices, wrote short company descriptions, and added Google Finance formulas for live prices. It took about 30 minutes of the AI time and 10 minutes of his.
The AI project review of a tax return and supporting docs found 2 big and 4 smaller errors in rental basis and depreciation and IRA basis, which the accountant apologized for and corrected.
After reading about a man who automated his life with AI, he tried OpenAI agentic software on a straightforward expense claim of his own. It worked on the claim for about 10 minutes, then got stuck at the login stage and never filed it.
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A screen recording shows a user asking the AI to review three months of bank statements across three connected accounts and say where the money goes. The AI reported $4,320/month average spending against $4,850 income, dining up 35% to $410/month, and three subscriptions totalling $47/month unused for 90 days, offering to cancel them.
He told the AI to request anything it could get sent to him for free, with no limits set. So far a fabric sample and a lot of state travel guides have arrived, and he is a bit worried about how much more is coming.
Steve Morseman gave the AI his ISP account info and asked it to cut the bill or improve service. The AI used its calling feature to wait on hold, negotiate, then patch him in to pick between two saving options — $840/year claimed, no plan change.
A young woman in Los Angeles upgrading her home electronics lab used AI's 'Chef' agent to find a soldering station under $200 on Marketplace, compare five specific models, have the agent message sellers directly, and negotiate the price down $50 before she picked up the Hakko FX-888D, unboxed and assembled it on camera.
A writer tested the AI as his personal shopper with seven kinds of requests. Three worked: it found a Batman omnibus for $74.99 against a $125 list price, the cheapest PS5 DualSense at Walmart for $67.61, and a used PS4 game on eBay for $54.99. Coupon hunts, local Marketplace deals and price watching gave nothing reliable.
This only partly worked. Worth knowing before you try it.
Cole Bennett's agent 'Milo' sent a Monday morning summary, suggested a date night, curated Italian options from his saved reels (Rosetta & Vine, Savoca & Sons, Marchetti's), booked Savoca & Sons at 7pm via OpenTable under his name, then offered to order white roses and had Moon's Flower Shop deliver a $238 bouquet the same day via AMEX authorization.
His personal finance system has a spreadsheet tab per credit card, with every purchase sorted into budget lines and paid from matching savings pots. Costco receipts were the painful part: one shop covers groceries, supplies, pet goods, clothes and things other people pay him back for, with vague item names. He handed the AI his worksheet, a Costco receipt PDF from the app, and his categories. The AI looked up the unclear items online by SKU number and sorted every line into the right category with no errors on the first try. He says it will save him over an hour every week.
Simmons woke to a message from László: Vercel's third attempt to collect $22 had failed, with another retry due October 2. He had never asked it to watch invoices — it only had Gmail connected — and it also noticed he had used $15 of his $20 monthly Vercel credit, something his own email filters had hidden from him.
Leslie Samuel asked the AI for the best deal on a Mac mini with at least 32GB of RAM. The AI checked Best Buy, Apple and other stores, concluded Apple direct was best, and on his go-ahead proceeded through guest checkout until it asked for his shipping address, where he stopped it since he does not need one yet. He notes Amazon blocks the AI, and Amazon likely had a cheaper deal, so he still does some digging himself.
This only partly worked. Worth knowing before you try it.
In 'A Month with AI', the MBI Deep Dives author writes that the AI filled out forms with five auto insurance carriers from his details and showed him quotes; switching at the same coverage saved $1,530 per year. He then set the AI to repeat the shop every five months, ahead of each six-month renewal, indefinitely.
A man fought USAA for over a month over the right deductible for roofing damage. The AI read his insurance documents and helped him keep a running argument, and he won and saved $1,838.30.
He wired a double entry bookkeeping tool into AI and snaps photos of receipts as they come. When he fed it a batch of bank statements for his rental property, the reconciliation flagged a missing $47 charge for him to check.
Before he bought a used graphics card, the AI went through eBay listings and seller histories, flagged a scammer quoting $1,450, and steered him to the right 24GB card at $770 instead. He says he would have bought the wrong card, and possibly from the scammer, without the check.
Elon Musk posted that he asked the AI to research the most fun Lego Star Wars kits for young kids and order them; the shared confirmation showed five sets totalling $241.34 with free delivery. The screenshot also exposed his order number, email and partial card details, and users claimed they used them to try to cancel or alter the order via Lego’s service bot.
An agent account (Acrid) reports on its own receipt video pipeline. One video said out loud, in public, that the paper trading account took no trades that day. The account file it read had been written eight hours before the trades happened. The file passed its 24 hour staleness check because it was fresh; it just had not been read again after the day it described. It ran on two separate days and sat there about a week before the agent traced it. No alert fired, because nothing was malformed.
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The same writer set the AI a daily price watch on a WWE Blu-ray. The AI checked listings each day and pointed him to a copy on eBay under $20 with free shipping, bundled with another disc he plans to sell on.
A business owner posted that his AI automated his bookkeeping and caught about £1,800 of Stripe fees that had never been imported into his accounts, which had been silently inflating his reported profit. The find corrected profit he thought he had.
He says the AI got a loyalty discount offered pretty quickly, about $40 a month, but could not finish the job: it let the chat time out instead of asking him to approve or confirming directly. Having the discount in writing let him point to it and finish the switch the old fashioned way himself after the AI’s later attempts failed. He still counts the $40 a month as saved.
$40a month
This only partly worked. Worth knowing before you try it.
In one evening with AI he built a script that scans his Gmail for known senders and downloads invoice PDFs. If a supplier sent no PDF, it saves the email itself as a PDF, puts everything together for the office, and logs what it downloaded and sent so nothing goes twice.
He had the AI start his tax work this year and it caught that his property manager had double billed him for invoices on an investment property. The catch saved him $6,000, and the token cost of finding it was about $6.
Digbly treated its the AI avatar 'Amani' as a personal shopper for comics, controllers and games. The baseline-plus-deal-hunt prompt surfaced the Batman omnibus at $74.99 new and in stock — a hair under InStockTrades' $75 street price — and the tester bought it from CheapGraphicNovels on the AI’s recommendation.
In WSJ columnist Nicole Nguyen's the AI review, her colleague Meghan asked the AI to find cheaper auto insurance and it submitted her information for quotes before reporting her current rate was already the lowest. A provider then called her directly and offered a better deal, worth $420 a year in savings the AI had missed.
$420a year
This only partly worked. Worth knowing before you try it.
Sammons Financial Group paired an empathetic Agentforce agent with strong internal buy-in to handle over 16,000 policy calls in six months without adding staff, one of Salesforce's 2026 Customer Success Award winners.
Per the ai-first.fr writeup of the video: 'He gave it his card statements and his inbox, and the agent found a $200 the AI Max subscription he had stopped using, then cancelled it in the browser.' Reviewer says the AI saves him ~$1,000/month.
The AI found the lowest-price detergent on Coupang and added it to the user's cart, and separately set a fare-drop alert for a trip the user is watching.
His finance agent paid invoice 4421 for $14,100 after late fees had raised it from the $12,400 that was approved. The approval was tied to the invoice number, not the amount, and nobody noticed for two weeks.
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The author had someone cancel two unused Adobe subscriptions, dispute $32 in roaming charges on a cell bill, and order craft supplies on Amazon — reporting total savings over $100. Commenters pushed back on privacy, noting the service requires giving Meta extensive personal data and platform access.