‘A-Commerce’ will be the biggest disruption since the web, and Digital Wallets are the new accounts
Plus: Is LLM ‘Empathetic Mirroring’ a problem, and the 4 Business Models of Consumer AI Agents
Hi everyone, thanks for coming back to Customer Futures.
Each week I unpack the disruptive shifts around digital wallets, Personal AI and digital customer relationships.
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A different format this week.
First up is The Customer Futures View. Then the usual smattering of Empowerment Tech stories that you need to be paying attention to. And as always, some other links and what’s open in my tabs this week.
So it seems ‘AI Agents’ are the New Hot Thing.
Many are saying that the future really is here, and it’s about to be distributed. So what is it going to be like as a digital customer?
Welcome back to the Customer Futures newsletter.
In this week’s edition:
The Customer Futures View: Digital wallets are the new accounts
‘A-Commerce’ will be the biggest disruption since the web
What if our browsers could add a ‘Digital Credentials API’?
Is LLM ‘Empathetic Mirroring’ a problem when it’s applied by chatbots?
‘Perplexity Shopping’ is here, and not everyone is going to be happy
If cyber criminals co-opt AI Agents, they have keys to the kingdom
Let’s Go.
The Customer Futures View: Digital wallets are the new accounts
When the web browser was first launched, it was considered a new consumption channel.
A window into the information super-highway. To view. To browse. To ‘surf’ exciting new web pages and digital content.
For reading digital articles and e-magazines. For accessing online TV and digital radio.
Browsers became the new battleground to compete for consumers. All about attention and eyeballs. The ‘browser wars’ soon broke out.
But most missed the real shift to come.
That browsers and the web would soon turn into the world’s largest publishing platform, completely changing the way we live, work and play.
The same is happening with digital wallets today.
The Web3 crowd say digital wallets are about transferrable digital assets and ownership without a central authority. And they are right.
But there’s more.
Many payments and identity experts will say that digital wallets are really about identity. Proving who you are and what you are entitled to do (tickets, access). Maybe even with fancy selective disclosure features.
They are also right. But that’s not the whole picture.
A pioneering group of others believe that digital wallets are really about the portability of any verifiable information, and digital authenticity.
And they too are right. We’re now getting much, much closer to what I’m talking about.
But there’s still more.
Once individuals can show up independently, with their own digital tools - digital wallets with verifiable, data, identity and digital assets - then we have something new, something special.
It’s a New. Customer. Channel.
Once a business asks for some data from a customer’s digital wallet, they have the opportunity to form a new digital connection with that customer.
A persistent one.
A verifiable one.
A private one.
An auditable, secure and intelligent one.
My goodness, what business wouldn’t want that? Imagine plugging that customer connection directly into business systems and processes, like CRM.
Yes, digital wallets can hold and manage assets. And identity. And portable, verifiable, authentic data.
But with the narrower ‘data and assets’ framing, we risk missing the larger market opportunity.
Digital wallets become the new account.
For everything.
OK so what is an account?
With money, it’s a shared and trusted record of all your transactions. Who did what, who paid what, and who owes who.
With business, it’s a shared record of all your products and interactions. It’s a critical customer channel and interface. The place people come to check things. To ask things. To ‘do business’.
Each customer account has a number. A unique identifier. It has a way to message customers. A way to record what’s been sent to, and received from, the customer.
Ring a bell?
Digital wallets will be able to do all this and much more.
They will also be more secure. More private. More flexible. And more portable.
So it’s possible - I’d even argue more likely - that digital wallets may be more disruptive than browsers were in the 1990s.
But like browsers, they will first be misunderstood.
Digital wallets will become the new account.
For business? For government? For banking? For health? For travel?
For life.
I have said for over a decade that the only 360° view of the customer, is the customer.
Just imagine, once a customer can bring their own wallet - their own account - to each business:
The economics change. Why would a business maintain a complex and proprietary account platform when digital interactions can be handled - indeed automated - via a verifiable digital wallet that’s available on every smart device?
The data flows change. Why would a business store unnecessary customer data when they can just ask for it on demand, with consent, from the customer’s digital wallet? Then delete it again once used?
The risks change. What if we could reduce fraud and account takeover to near zero, when every customer interaction has to be authenticated via the customer’s digital wallet (likely with biometrics)?
The very fabric of the customer relationship changes.
This is just a glimpse of what‘s possible, and what’s coming. Especially when you tie it to digital AI agents. More on that below.
When you look closely, you’ll see that digital wallets aren’t even The Thing. They are ‘below the surface’ of the customer channel.
Lots to be written about that. Coming soon.
For now, it’s a simple switch: when you hear ‘account’, just think ‘wallet’.
Strap yourselves in. 2025 is going to be wild.
Jamie
The biggest disruption since the web: A-Commerce
One of the landmark breakthroughs of the early web was being able to make payments online. It gave birth to a new $bn economy.
And ‘e-commerce’ was born.
I now firmly believe that AI Agents will have the same impact on the digital economy. But much faster, and with a much larger wrecking ball.
I think we’re about to see the birth of a similar shift away from traditional commerce channels.
This time it’s via AI Agents
This time it’s ‘A-Commerce’.
Stripe just announced agent-native payment rails, and Perplexity just announced shopping and checkout tools.
It’s not hard to see how this all comes together as a new layer of digital commerce, powered by AI Agents. Colliding with today’s payment networks and tomorrow’s token networks.
Not least because folks are getting very excited about how AI finally can come together with Web3.
Web3 wallets and interactions have been terribly hard to use. Or rather, terribly hard to use by humans.
What if that’s the point? Now we can let our software (agents) do it for us. They can have their own payment rails, and abstract all the painful payment experiences away.
It’s worth paying attention to the latest article by Jesus Rodriguez, the CEO of IntoTheBlock. He’s written a compelling essay about how AI Agents will form the new backbone of the digital economy.
“If we think of autonomous agents as extensions of our business and professional workflows, then e-commerce will be a crucial component of interactions between humans and agents, as well as between agents themselves.”
“Payments have been central to the evolution of the internet. PayPal unlocked many early e-commerce workflows, and platforms like Stripe have fully catalyzed this transformation. If AI agents become the fabric of the intelligent internet, financial transactions will be a key component of this new layer.”
Spot on.
Related, Gartner did some research a couple of years ago into ‘Machine Customers’. They were thinking about autonomous software agents helping printers automatically ordering ink. And help cars organise their next service.
But AI agents are now here. On behalf of the customer.
Which is precisely what Gartner’s research included. Their paper concludes that not only will agents and ‘machine customers’ be a big deal, but they said this:
“It would suggest a market shift roughly twice as large and twice as fast as the historical arrival of e-commerce.”
Agent-Commerce (yes I’m call it A-commerce) is about to arrive folks. And we better be prepared.
More posts below on why, and what we can do about it.
RODRIGUEZ’S POST, GARTNER ON MACHINE CUSTOMERS
What if our browsers could add a "Digital Credentials API"?
Another fantastic post by the excellent Ankur Bannerjee. On the hot debate going on right now at the W3C, on if and how browsers should handle digital credentials.
“If it's easier to ask for, say, a digital drivers license, then there's a chance that *every* website starts asking for it as a basic condition of access. That would be a *terrible* net result for privacy.
“Passkeys are great...until Apple or Google decide to shut down your iCloud/Google account without easy recourse for appeal. (This is not as outlandish as it seems, as it's happened to many prominent people in tech.)
“Since the Digital Credentials API is agnostic, there's a real point here that in India or China perhaps, it could easily turn into "show full ID when accessing", which in itself could be used for censorship or having a chilling effect - or leave out people who can't provide it.”
An important discussion at a critical time.
As Ankur points out, we need leadership here on the implications of digital credentials, not just the technical possibilities.
Is LLM ‘Empathetic Mirroring’ a problem when it’s applied by chatbots?
Says StJohn Deakins:
“Latest research from the Warsaw University of Technology shows that many LLM AI's attempt to mirror the personality traits of their users: from their conscientiousness to neuroticism. (It's not clear if it's by accident or design).
“In the race to make AI more empathetic, there’s a growing risk: mirroring human traits too closely will unintentionally (or otherwise) amplify anxiety, community polarization, and even social exclusion.
“At DataSapien, we believe that AI should do more than reflect us to gamify interaction, engagement and attention metrics - we have seen where that story leads before. Personal AI should empower us to grow.
“For example a personal AI might:
Encourage optimism when we doubt ourselves
Counsel us when we are reckless
Challenge biases to broaden our perspectives
“Most importantly it must be our AI, always in the user's control and respecting their individuality with 100% private personalization. By ensuring that personal data stays personal, Personal AI helps users thrive without compromising privacy or autonomy.”
A thoughtful piece, by one of the OGs of the Personal AI movement.
‘Perplexity Shopping’ is here, and not everyone is going to be happy
A new shopping feature from one of the giant AI platforms.
‘Shoplexity’ (stop it) will give you the best shopping option based on your requirements and price. Neat.
And if you share a picture of an item, it will go find it and allow you to buy it right from within the Perplexity interface.
And they’re serious.
There’s already a retailer programme to get products listed. So far it’s only for the larger merchants, but it’s free and they include checkout and payments. Plus Shopify integrations.
When 54% of shopping today search starts on Amazon, you’ve got to ask how long it’ll take to seriously damage Amazon Marketplace traffic.
Perplexity’s CEO says:
“We see this as a natural next step for AI products not just to offer answers but to help users accomplish tasks that would otherwise take them hours.”
“The user authorizes Perplexity to transact on their behalf, and the checkout flow is accomplished with a mix of AI and humans in the loop.”
Right now this is ‘Personalized’, not personal. Meaning I have no idea how it is filtering the options, nor how and where it’s looking. I have to tell it what I want, and it won’t always know my context.
But.
It’s a major step toward ‘intent-casting’. Where I express my needs to the ‘market’, and brands can respond with offers (they are no longer ads).
I can see the Shoplexity API being embedded in other platforms. And that’s where it gets interesting.
I’m planning a 10k run in a sport app, and the Shoplexity plug-in can pull up the right kit at the right time, based on my training schedule.
I’m planning a trip in a travel app, and the Shoplexity plug-in can pull up just the right things I might need on the go.
You can see now that this is going to be a fight for the interface. If we can seamlessly stitch together smart agents that can do things for us, what happens to the customer experience? And perhaps most importantly, who provides it?
This is all going to come down to context (why), brand (who) and relationship (where).
And that is the new game in town.
The business that wins will be the one that empowers people the most. Because when you strip it all back this is all about customer empowerment.
And not all brands are going to be happy about it.
If cyber criminals co-opt AI Agents, they have keys to the kingdom
Spend much time with the OWASP Foundation? Me neither. But they’ve just published the top 10 AI Agent risks. And boy do we need to be paying attention.
As Stuart Winter-Tear puts it:
“If AI agents become widespread - the more I learn, the more convinced I am - it raises the worrying prospect of hackers hijacking them.
“AI agents will need extensive privileges for the tools they call to operate on our behalf, to be truly effective, and if cyber criminals co-opt them, they potentially have keys to the kingdom.
“I know we’re more in the experimental phase right now, with rapid discovery and learning, but now is the time to start thinking about AI agents' security. I don’t want to see these things released into the wild, and the lessons learnt the painful way.
Some of the noteworthy risks include:
Agent Authorization and Control Hijacking (expected)
Agent Knowledge Base Poisoning (likely)
Agent Goal and Instruction Manipulation (yikes)
Agent Memory and Context Manipulation (erm)
Agent Orchestration and Multi-Agent Exploitation (woah)
Agent Resource and Service Exhaustion (wtf)
My next question - and concern - is that these risks will themselves get worse as AI Agents get more capable and autonomous.
This is all part of yet another critical conversation that needs to be dialled up.
So I’ll say two things again:
Digital privacy isn’t going to be our problem. Digital intimacy is going to be our problem. When we let Personal AI into our lives without guardrails, what decisions (and nudges) will they make without us noticing? And who is going to govern them and manage (possibly be liable for?) these risks?
AI Agents are going to need digital identity as much as we humans do. Without ‘proof of person’ (along with biometrics) and ‘proof of agent’ (along with their entitlements), fraud and data security is going to get much, much worse.
OTHER THINGS
There are far too many interesting and important Customer Futures things to include this week.
So here are some more links to chew on:
The Dark Patterns of Personalized Persuasion in Large Language Models: Exposing Persuasive Linguistic Features for Big Five Personality Traits in LLMs Responses. READ
The 4 Business Models of Consumer AI Agents READ
LLMs change behaviour based on the user's assumed culture - whoops READ
Why we can't afford to delay access to Digital Identities READ
What was the significance of the TBD projects to the SSI vision? READ
And that’s a wrap. Stay tuned for more Customer Futures soon, both here and over at LinkedIn.
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