A Priceless Pass from Mastercard, Google Says Don't Share Confidential Data With Them, and Is This The Year Everyone Gets An AI Agent?
A Priceless Pass from Mastercard, Google Says Don't Share Confidential Data With Them, and Is This The Year Everyone Gets An AI Agent?
Plus: Acceptance Networks for Self-Sovereign Identity, Face Check from Microsoft and Deepfakes will hurt 30% of organizations’ trust in biometrics
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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Also, a note that I’m doing a LinkedIn Live today with the excellent Ethical Commerce Alliance. 3pm UK, 7am PT.
The topic: Empowerment Tech is going to disrupt your digital customer relationships. Are you ready?
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In this week’s edition:
Is this the year everyone gets an AI agent?
Deepfakes will hurt 30% of organizations’ trust in biometrics by 2026
A Priceless Pass from Mastercard
Google Gemini Warning: Don’t Share Confidential Information
16 New Design Patterns That Empower People
Microsoft Entra Verified ID introduces Face Check
Personalisation and Rethinking the Service Experience
… plus other links about the future of digital customers you don’t want to miss
Let’s Go.
Is this the year everyone gets an AI agent?
Javaun Moradi at Mozilla’s Innovation Studio predicts that 2024 is the year that everyone will get an AI agent.
Specifically, he points to the transformational opportunity in journalism and news:
“My agent’s top priority will be to protect my time and well-being. Much of the internet provokes and manipulates. In the future, most content will be written by bots.
“My agent will work with your newsroom agent to help me cut through the noise and discover, filter, read, analyze, fact-check, refute, summarize, and recommend — all while I sleep.
“By the end of 2024, newsrooms will begin using agents to tailor their reporting and information serving to the needs of each reader. When news consumers have quick questions, they’ll ask their trusted newsagent — not a search engine.
“One of your agent’s most important jobs is to reach out to my agent many times per day with important updates and breaking news. My agent decides when to interrupt me.”
Here are the pay-attention nuggets. My agent will
Protect my time and wellbeing
Work while I sleep
Replace search
Decide when to interrupt me
I really don’t think this is flying taxi stuff, only ready in 10 year’s time.
If a Personal AI finds product-market-fit for a niche, let’s say with news, then it could take off faster than ChatGPT did. In weeks, not months.
And he includes this at the end, on the commercial model:
“Ad-monetized content will struggle even more when the agent can provide a good-enough answer without anyone having to ever visit the original story page. The donation model (NPR, ProPublica) will translate to agents.
“We’ll revisit micropayments and content bundles yet again and may finally solve them.”
I think he’s right. But more importantly, I think this is the model that will flourish across every sector.
When each customer has a trusted digital endpoint that businesses can trust. Likely a digital wallet inside one or more apps. Where a digital agent will sit on top and ‘do the doing’ for me. Including signing into and managing my subscription services.
The result?
I won’t see ads any more when using those services. Or at least they won’t be ads any longer.
They will be offers.
Curated by my smart agent.
Let’s revisit the points above, but now consider how this could disrupt digital advertising as we know it:
Protect my time and well-being - why would my AI agent show me things that I can’t afford, don’t need or are intrusive?
Work while I sleep - why would my AI agent bother me during the day when it can request, filter and interact with businesses overnight, helping manage and smooth out the peaks of demand for the businesses?
Replace search - why would my AI agent display the ‘top 10 results’ of 104 billion search results, when instead it can filter and personalise what I need to see? Especially when those top 10 were skewed towards those businesses that paid the highest referral fee to the search engine?
Decide when to interrupt me - queuing requests, offers and information… even messages from my contacts. This will be a core feature of my AI agent. They won’t just help with the WHAT of my information feed. They’ll help with the WHEN.
Put all this together, dear reader, and you’ll see that agents will have a profound impact on digital advertising. Whose exact purpose is to get the right offer in front of the customer at the right time.
A while back the tech analyst Ben Evans asked what the next consumer wave would be. From PC to laptop. To mobile. Then to the smartphone. So what’s next?
I believe it will be digital agents. Personal agents. And Personal AI.
Yes, it might start with digital news. Is this the year? Maybe. But it’s certainly going to start on my side, working for me.
Deepfakes will hurt 30% of organizations’ trust in biometrics by 2026
Says Gartner in a new report. Not surprising. Here are three stats why this matters:
Deepfake injection attacks (bypassing the camera) increased by 200% in 2023 (Mitek Systems)
There was a 3,000% increase in deepfake fraud attempts in 2023 (Onfido)
Most apps (79%) now use biometrics for app authentication, up from 27% in 2022 (GetApp)
It’s now clear that we can’t always believe what we digitally see or hear.
We need new tools to build digital trust. But digital trust isn’t about transparent check-boxes for consent any more. It’s now about account takeover using a copy of your (live) face.
We need new, more intelligent digital channels with customers. New ways to interact, securely and privately.
Authentically.
Empowerment Tech is rising. And it’s going to be as much about defence (protect users and data) as much as offence (offer seamless experiences and digital growth). Digital wallets, verifiable credentials, Personal AI.
A new ‘Customer Stack’, built on the side of the individual, is the only way through this AI-fake-everything mess.
A Priceless Pass from Mastercard
It’s the latest Web3 loyalty play from Mastercard. The pitch: “Mastercard will deliver free digital passes to complement priceless experiences and better connect everyone to a world of possibilities.”
A MeToo play. Web3 Rah Rah. NFTs with pompoms.
But look a little closer. A simple web2 loyalty story (login with an email address), but with web3 goodies (claim a digital pass, a portable and verifiable NFT).
Web2.5? Maybe an accessible bridge for the masses? Neat. And they have grand ambitions. As Christian Brent puts it:
“The interoperability of on-chain tokens means that they have limitless potential future use-cases (and hence commercial value) beyond the end of the initial campaign.
“Once Mastercard has amassed enough users and engagement, they become a medium of communication themselves; a channel to communicate directly to consumers.”
Starting to feel Empowerment Tech-ish, no?
Maybe. There’s a snag.
Mastercard already sells basic consumer profiles to media companies. That’s a trust red flag anyway. And with NFTs they can, in theory, access ‘richer’ insights. But NFTs have a massive gap.
They are great for portable digital assets. But they are terrible for handling personal data. I don’t want my personal data anywhere near a Blockchain.
What if the Mastercard Pass user needs to be over 18? Or in a certain location? Or proveably already an existing customer?
To really get under the skin of web3 loyalty, to really personalise experiences, businesses are going to need verifiable personal data. Not just a simple ‘pass’.
That’s where verifiable credentials are going to kick in. Priceless Pass is nudging towards an Empowerment Tech play. And Mastercard might just be on to something if they can see a path to verifiable credentials.
Where they can not only offer a 1-dimensional Pass. But instead unleash a Portable, Private, Personal Profile under the customer’s control.
That really could be priceless.
Google Gemini Warning: Don’t Share Confidential Information
Gemini is a standalone chatbot, but also the tech inside Google’s Android App and the iPhone Google App.
And it’s just sent out a pretty important update to its privacy notice:
“To help with quality and improve our products (such as generative machine-learning models that power Gemini Apps), human reviewers read, annotate, and process your Gemini Apps conversations.”
“We take steps to protect your privacy as part of this process. This includes disconnecting your conversations with Gemini Apps from your Google Account before reviewers see or annotate them.”
“Please don’t enter confidential information in your conversations or any data you wouldn’t want a reviewer to see or Google to use to improve our products, services, and machine-learning technologies.”
In other words, don’t enter anything you wouldn’t want a human to see or Google to use across the whole business.
Waaat?
Presumably that now excludes using Google’s AI platform for Personal AI use cases? Using customer personal data to personalise Google’s recommendations, services and experiences?
Surely this doesn’t end well for Google.
Either folks will be warned about this publicly, and avoid using Gemini for personal data-related things (which is everything). Or people will start using the platform in anger, and sooner or later there will be a landmark data privacy incident.
This points to an ugly truth in the emerging Personal AI market.
Who will run our deeply personal AI models? And what data will they be trained on? And perhaps more importantly: will consumers even have the confidence to share their most private data with these powerful new AI platforms?
Be careful Google.
It’s this very data set - our highly personal, contextual and useful data - that will become the most valuable asset. Your competitive advantage.
Not the AI platform itself, which is already commoditising.
16 New Design Patterns That Empower People
Over the last few years, Sarah Gold has assembled a world-class design team at the agency IF.
They produce world-class thinking about Digital Trust, including design patterns. Made freely available for anyone to use, in any product, anywhere.
It’s an amazing body of work. And the result of years of thoughtful experiments with real people, on-the-ground research and engagement with an amazing set of global clients.
Their latest project is a set of design patterns for building trust in AI.
As Sarah puts it:
“AI makes trust more complicated. That’s partly because technology, like AI, makes trust more complicated, in several ways:
AI makes it nearly impossible to distinguish whether what we are talking to is a human or a bot.
Fast changes in UI and more personalisation make it harder for people to understand how a service works, and so seek redress when something goes wrong.
Many of us lack useful mental models of how systems work, and in the absence of useful mental models we will each rely on folk stories.
Generally, we are overly trusting of technology, believing that AI is more correct than a human and is unbiased (neither of which is true).
“Ultimately, that lack of trust makes it harder for teams to innovate successfully or responsibly.
“Patterns can help create trustworthy services. We use patterns across everything we design, from cars to public services. That’s why you see the same things pop-up again and again, like how to log in or to add credit card details.
“But we don’t only need patterns that help make the user experience easier. We need patterns that also add just enough friction to:
Demonstrate just enough information about the underlying system and gubbins so people are empowered to make better choices.
Humanise AI’s complex systems to reduce the frustration people can feel when using automated tools.
Help people understand why and how a service has changed, so they feel safe and respected in their experience.
This is the very definition of Important Work. And will fast become the bedrock for those building Empowerment Tech services.
I can highly recommend working with Sarah and the IF team. Especially if you’re working on Digital Trust.
Which should be everyone.
Microsoft Entra Verified ID introduces Face Check
Soon, lots of people will have digital wallets. Businesses, employers and governments will be making them available at scale to us all.
When we set them up, many providers will ask for an ‘anchor’ credential. Proof of who we are. Perhaps some version of an identity document.
Apple already enables users to do this with State IDs in the USA. But it could as easily be your driver’s licence or passport. Or your employee credential. The coming eIDAS wallets will have the EU citizen equivalent, a ‘PID’.
Before we know it, our digital wallets will also hold lots of other personal data too. Personal profiles. Account credentials. Access passes. Memberships. Loyalty data.
And we will be able to share our data with businesses during wallet-enabled customer experiences.
Exciting stuff. But it throws up an important question: how will companies know that the person presenting the data is the person who was given the data?
The answer: By binding the wallet to the credential (so we can prove where the data came from). And then by binding the human to the wallet (so we can know which human operates the wallet). Voila.
Microsoft have just announced their version of this, called Face Check.
“Apps can make a simple API request for users to perform a Face Check against a Verified Employee credential, state-issued government ID, or a custom digital credential with a trusted photo.
“For example, businesses can enable a wide variety of self-service scenarios including activating a passkey or resetting a password. A help desk service for a business can request a Face Check against a Verified Employee credential to verify the identity quickly and securely.
“To reduce compliance risk, apps receive a confidence score for the match against the photo from the desired credential, without gaining access to liveness data.
Many digital wallets have had variants of this for a while. But it’s the first from one of the Wallet Majors.
I think it’s a bit of a milestone. Why? Because it gets interesting when a business can request a Face Check against any credential in the wallet, not just the ID credential.
“Next, we are extending this API pattern to verify other identity attributes that businesses care about, including verified work history and legal entity verification in partnership with Dun & Bradstreet (DNB), LexisNexis® Risk Solutions, and IDEMIA.”
You can imagine that Microsoft will offer their enterprise clients an embedded digital wallet.
The ability to add a digital wallet to any enterprise app. And therefore the ability to add any digital credential to a user experience. Microsoft already offers the Office Suite across Apple and Google devices. So why not also enable a digital wallet?
Here’s the kicker. The rest of Microsoft’s enterprise clients can then be easily set up to request data from any one of those customer or employee wallets.
And, using Face Check, any of those businesses can prove, seamlessly and privately, that they are dealing with the right person.
The ecosystem dynamics here are vast.
Microsoft is already huge, yes. But the key thing here is distribution. Think Azure. Think Active Directory. Plus all their global Partner Programs. And they own LinkedIn. And then you can throw in their AI rollout with Copilot.
Apple (with a vast consumer base and control over the operating system) and Microsoft (with their enterprise reach and LinkedIn) have enough coverage, in most countries, with most users, to kick the digital wallet market into gear.
Now Zoom out. You’ll see that the starting gun for the Empowerment Tech market has sounded.
Personalisation and Rethinking the Service Experience
Graham Hill has been studying personalisation, experience design and service management for decades.
He’s now come up with a series of modules to make sense of it all. Easy to digest. Straight to the point. And evidence-based. There’s real gold here, and includes nuanced perspectives about using customer data at scale.
The modules are written for enterprises, and speak to the potential of Empowerment Tech. Giving customers their own digital tools to make hyper-personalisation finally possible at scale.
Here’s a snippet (bold mine):
“Customers don’t plan out their journeys in detail, instead, journeys ‘emerge’, one interaction at a time. We should design service experiences to allow interactions to emerge, not around fixed journeys."
“Service experiences are often designed for all customers. That is a wasteful approach. Experiences should be designed for the customers with the highest incremental value.”
“There is strong evidence that we should design experiences around the jobs customers want to get done, rather than around customers themselves.”
“Customers come to us for help getting their jobs done. We should make things as easy as possible for customers. But no easier.”
“Most service experiences are managed at the centre. But the best contextual data is at the edge. Decisions about the experience should be made where the best data is, at the edge, not at the centre.”
Once again for those at the back: the customer experience is about to be disrupted by the customer themselves.
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:
Post: You don't need cookies to track conversions, why? READ
Article: Acceptance Networks for Self-Sovereign Identity READ
Podcast: The business impact of doing digital identity right WATCH
Paper: Why Are There So Many Digital Identities? READ
News: Onfido to be acquired by Entrust READ
Blog: The 4 Hidden Costs Of "Free" AI Products READ
And that’s a wrap. Stay tuned for more Customer Futures soon, both here and over at LinkedIn.
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