Are banks ready for when customers get their own AI?
What changes when customers become a thousand times smarter overnight?
Hi everyone, thanks for coming back to Customer Futures.
Each week I unpack the disruptive shifts around Empowerment Tech. Digital wallets, Personal AI and the future of the digital customer relationship.
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Hi everyone,
Another Customer Futures Conversation for you.
This week, it’s about a very simple shift that has huge implications for brands. As I’ve written about for some time now, AI isn’t just ‘generative’ anymore. AI Agents can now do things.
And the most important disruption won’t be when businesses and employees get agents.
It’s when customers do.
When that happens - and it’s already started - it not only changes the ‘front door’ of retailers, merchants, and banks. It has a profound impact right across the customer journey. Where customers arrive with much more power, more information, and more automation,
It will fundamentally change how we think about risk, about identity, and the underlying operating model of our businesses.
So this week, we go deeper into Agentic Commerce. With two people who’ve been thinking about it for much longer than most. Kirsty Rutter from Lloyds Banking Group, Dave Birch from 15 Mb Ltd.
Last summer, they published a paper on agentic customers in the Journal of Digital Banking. All about when bank customers get their own AI.
It’s a real peek into the future, exploring what can become possible with AI Agents working for people, not just businesses.
I’m interested in this whole area because it forces a new set of questions we don’t yet have good answers for:
If we’ve spent 20 years trying to keep bots out… how do we let the good bots in?
How do we know it’s “Jamie’s AI Agent”?
How do we manage delegated authority, where the bank can know that the AI Agent is really working on behalf of Jamie?
And what does permission look like when it’s not a checkbox, but a persistent ‘mandate’?
And that’s all before we get to the big one. Liability. If my bot goes a bit bonkers, who’s responsible? Me? The bot provider? The bank? The trust framework? The regulator?
We had a blast in this latest Customer Futures Conversation, where we talked about:
What changes when customers become “a thousand times smarter overnight” (03:13)
The bot-to-bot channel: why banks can’t just “bolt this onto the app” (07:25)
Permissioning, liability, and the new compliance layer (12:57)
How regulation collides with machine-readable enforcement (19:13)
Why digital wallets matter (and not in the “cards UI” way people think) (21:20)
Why this is all accelerating (27:29)
You can find the full recording here.
Regular readers will know that this idea of customer AI - of Personal Agents - is not only growing as a new customer channel, but is beginning to take shape as a new market.
It’s now the focus of my work, and is why we’ve just set up a new advisory firm, Trusted Agents.
If you want to keep up with what we’re working on, and the latest market developments, you can sign up to our new ‘Situation Room’ newsletter at www.thetrustedagents.ai.
We’re already working with businesses all over the world, and I’m excited about what’s coming.
If you’re putting together your agentic strategy, exploring digital wallets, want help to get executives aligned, and build out your planning assumptions for 2026, get in touch.
We’d love to help.
There’s never been a more important time to understand what trust, identity, and customer power look like in markets where AI agents increasingly act on people’s behalf.
And of course, the future of being a digital customer. So welcome back to the Customer Futures newsletter.
Wherever you are, whatever you are doing… stop, grab your headphones, and Let’s Go.
You can catch up with the next episode, and all Customer Futures newsletters here, and over at LinkedIn.
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