AI agents are not digital colleagues - and you're not ready for what’s coming
About our predictions for AI Agents, and why your business is not ready. Not really.
Hi everyone, thanks for coming back to Customer Futures.
Each week I unpack the disruptive shifts around Empowerment Tech. AI Agents, digital wallets, Personal AI in and the future of the digital customer relationship.
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Watch: Modernising government services… with digital ID and verifiable credentials
I’m going to be hosting a new series of digital ID webinars with iDen2 and Carahsoft, starting with a look at digital ID in government.
Because many government agencies are now under triple pressure: to reduce fraud, to improve digital service delivery, and to modernise legacy ID systems.
At the same time, today’s approaches like manual ID verification, repeated identity checks and siloed data systems are struggling to scale.
So we’ll be talking about digital wallets and verifiable credentials as a fresh, practical way to improve citizen trust, lower fraud, reduce inefficiencies and enable secure, reusable digital ID across government programmes.
We’ll be live on Wednesday May 27 at 1pm Eastern Time.
You can register for the online event here.
Hi folks,
This week, I’m sharing an important post by my co-founder Gam Dias.
It’s about why we decided to set up Trusted Agents. About our predictions for AI Agents. And why your business is not ready. Not really.
Gam talks through:
Why both sides of AI matter
Our AI agents predictions
Where it will go wrong
The three most important questions
The stage before the investment
It’s never been more important to understand the future of the digital customer. Welcome back to the Customer Futures newsletter.
Grab a hot chocolate with extra marshmallows, a cosy corner, and Let’s Go.
The starting line
Jamie Smith and I founded Trusted Agents in January 2026. But the thinking behind it goes back much further than that.
We met online during the pandemic, at one of the MyData and Internet Identity Workshop conferences that brought together a particular kind of person.
People who believed, before it was fashionable to believe it, that individuals should have meaningful agency over their own data and the value it generates.
By rights we should have met years earlier. When we did eventually compare notes, we realised we had been building toward the same idea from completely different directions.
That convergence is what Trusted Agents is built on.
Jamie spent years working at the intersection of digital identity and human trust. At Evernym, and through his work with Ctrl-Shift, he was focused on a specific and underappreciated problem: how does a person prove something about themselves to a system — their identity, their permissions, their credentials — without surrendering control to that system?
That question sits at the foundation of everything agentic commerce requires.
When a customer’s agent acts on their behalf, the business on the other side needs to know: is this agent authorised? Is it acting for a real, verified person? Has the delegation been done correctly?
Jamie had been building the trust and identity layer that answers those questions long before most organisations knew they needed to ask them.
But I came at it from a different angle.
I co-founded First Retail, recognised by Gartner as a Cool Vendor for our work on semantic infrastructure — the layer that gives agents the context they need to act accurately on behalf of real people. Not just permission to act, but understanding. Knowing what a person prefers, what they value, what they have consented to share, and what that means in the context of a specific transaction.
If Jamie’s work answers the question of whether an agent can be trusted, my work addresses what that agent actually needs to know to be useful.
Why both sides of AI matter
This is the argument at the centre of Trusted Agents, and it is worth being precise about it.
For agentic commerce to work, for a customer’s agent to discover, compare, negotiate, and transact on their behalf in a way that any serious B2C organisation would accept, three things need to be true simultaneously.
First, the agent needs a trusted identity: verifiable proof that it is acting for a real, authorised person, that the delegation has been made correctly, and that the permissions are current and specific.
Second, the agent needs personal context: a portable, accurate understanding of the person’s needs, preferences, and history that travels with the agent rather than being locked inside any single organisation’s systems.
And third, the organisation the agent is dealing with needs clean, machine-readable data: accurate product information, pricing, availability, and policy that an agent can interpret and act on without human intervention.
Without all three, the transaction either fails or produces outcomes that nobody intended.
And most organisations are currently missing at least two of them.
That is a readiness problem, not a tech thing. And readiness is what Trusted Agents is built to address.
Our AI agents predictions
When Jamie and I started mapping this out properly, we tracked the protocols and standards being developed to support agent-to-agent interaction. We studied the governance requirements. We looked at what machine-readable data actually needs to look like for an agent to use it reliably. We watched the identity infrastructure develop.
And we made a specific prediction: once that infrastructure layer was strong enough to support a complete, trusted, end-to-end agentic transaction, agentic commerce would accelerate fast.
Not gradually, but fast.
Because the underlying consumer behaviour — delegating decisions, automating routine purchases, using AI to navigate complex choices — was already there. The infrastructure was the missing piece, not the demand.
That infrastructure is now going in.
Model Context Protocol [a standard that allows AI agents to connect to external systems and data sources in a structured, controlled way] is being adopted at speed.
Agent-to-agent coordination frameworks are moving from experimental to production. The European Digital Identity Wallet is expected to reach 300 to 400 million people. Bain is forecasting $300 to $500 billion in agentic commerce in the US alone by 2030.
It feels like our predictions are landing.
Where it will go wrong
The consistent mistake organisations make is not underestimating the technology. It is overestimating their own readiness to deploy it.
Boards get sold on quick financial gains. Management is pushed to find cost reductions before the business is structurally prepared. Agentic tools get stood up on top of bad data and business processes that were designed for human workflows — and then people act surprised when things go wrong.
Here is the harder truth: AI agents are not digital colleagues.
They do not exercise human judgment, human restraint, or human common sense. If your business process has a gap that a polite human would quietly work around, an agent will find that gap and push straight through it. If your pricing engine responds to signals that can be gamed, agents will game it. If your controls depend on human interpretation, you do not have controls. You have assumptions.
The organisations that will navigate this well are the ones that understand the shift structurally, not just technically, before they commit to pilots and platforms.
That is the conversation Jamie and I have been having with banks, travel companies, and retailers.
It is the conversation Trusted Agents exists to have.
The three most important questions
I want to be transparent about something, because I think the openness is useful.
When Jamie and I were planning Trusted Agents, we did not just ask ourselves who might want what we do. We used a framework from the book Levers by Ryan Tansom — specifically the W3 method — to pressure-test our assumptions.
The three questions are simple. Who do you believe your customer is, and what data do you have to prove it? What do they actually buy from you — not what you sell, but what they buy? And why do they buy it?
They sound obvious. They are not.
Most businesses answer them from instinct and stop there. The discipline is in checking the answers against evidence, and then being honest about what the evidence says.
Here is how we worked through them.
WHO
We kept returning to the same profile. Not the CTO. Not the CDO. Not the transformation programme lead who has already been given a budget and a mandate.
Rather, the person we consistently found ourselves most useful to was earlier than that — and more interesting.
It’s the innovator inside a medium to large B2C organisation who can see the shift coming, has been given or has taken on the responsibility for making sense of it, and is surrounded by people who are either dismissive or paralysed.
Personally ambitious. Intellectually ahead of the organisation. Carrying the weight of a technology shift that their peers have not yet fully registered.
In Geoffrey Moore’s terms — and this matters for how we think about timing — this person is an innovator operating inside an early or late majority organisation.
They are not a startup founder. They are not a frontier AI lab. They are someone trying to move a complex, regulated, human-filled organisation toward a structural shift that the organisation does not yet have the language to discuss.
WHAT
This one took us longer to answer honestly. We do not sell implementation. We do not sell model selection. We do not sell proof of concept factories.
What our clients actually buy — when we were rigorous about it — is clarity, orientation, and the confidence to move their organisation forward before the window closes.
They buy the thinking, the framing, and the shared language that allows them to have conversations internally that they could not have before. They buy the stage before the formal programme. They are buying the conditions that make everything else possible.
WHY
Because they need to become the internal leader who turns agentic AI confusion into credible next steps — without sounding like they are repeating vendor hype.
Because the personal stakes are real.
Because the technology shift is moving faster than any they have managed before. The organisations that get the framing right early will have a material advantage.
And because the leaders who create that clarity will be remembered for it. The ones who wait for consensus will be managing someone else’s roadmap.
The stage before the investment
But something has shifted in the last few months. The conversations we are having with banks, travel companies, and retailers have changed in character.
Six months ago, the questions were exploratory. What is this, where is it going, should we be paying attention?
Now the questions are operational:
What does this mean for our customer relationships specifically?
Where are our processes exposed?
How do we brief our board without either overhyping or understating what is coming?
How do we move hundreds of people from awareness to a shared point of view without creating chaos?
That shift in the quality of the question tells us the market has moved.
Leaders who were watching are now feeling the pressure to act, and they are looking for something that most of the market is not yet providing — not a vendor pitch, not a generic AI literacy programme, but a structured way to think clearly about what agentic commerce actually changes, and where to direct attention first.
That is the gap Jamie and I have been working in. And it’s getting busier.
Importantly, there is a particular moment that many of the leaders we work with describe in almost identical terms.
They can see the shift coming. They have enough context to know it is serious. But their organisation has not yet developed the shared understanding needed to act — no common language, no agreed point of view, no internal momentum.
They are not blocked by a failed pilot. They are earlier than that. They are trying to create the conditions that make good decisions possible, before anyone is ready to make them.
Before investment.
That is a specific and demanding place to be. It requires moving executives who are sceptical, peers who are distracted, and teams who are waiting for direction — all at the same time, without the authority that comes with a formal mandate or a signed-off budget.
It’s also exactly the stage we have built Trusted Agents for.
So I’ll say it again:
The consistent mistake organisations make is not underestimating the technology. It is overestimating their own readiness to deploy it.
It is such an exciting time. But one that demands careful attention.
We set up Trusted Agents for those who can see what’s coming, but their business can’t. And if they don’t get executives aligned quickly, and make the case now, they may get left behind.
So be honest with yourself - is your business ready for what’s coming?
And that’s a wrap. Stay tuned for more Customer Futures soon, both here and over at LinkedIn.
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