ChatGPT gets ads, but you’ve missed the bigger revenue story

Plus: Google just announced Personal Intelligence, and Empowerment Tech just got into 1st gear

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.

If you haven’t yet signed up, why not subscribe:

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LinkedIn Live Today! Understanding ‘OBO’

Our next Customer Futures Conversation is a live chat on LinkedIn with Jon Evans from Digidentity. He’s the co-author of our recent OBO paper.

Where employees do things ‘On Behalf Of’ the company.

Join us later today, 22nd January at 4pm UK, where we’ll be talking about:

• Why employee identity beyond the business is so challenging

• How employee authority can leak between systems and across companies

• What verifiable, time-bound authority looks like in practice

• Why eIDAS 2.0, Business Wallets, and the UK DIATF make OBO inevitable

• How OBO shows up in real workflows

Look forward to seeing you then.

You can register here.

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Hi folks,

If you haven’t seen it yet, worth checking out the latest pretty impressive video injection demo using Clideo.

It shows a man seamlessly switching realistic faces and bodies, in what is likely already disrupting businesses everywhere relying on videos to check that someone is real.

Simon Taylor announced that ‘Video KYC’ was screwed.

But it was never screwed. It was over before it started. Because with AI, we’re now well past the audio and visual Turing Test.

The answer?

Most folks leap to Option 1:

Gather ever-more data about people, devices, locations, habits… ever more signals, build risk scores, collaborate with competitors, create shared data streams around bad actors and systems.

But they miss the massive, and increasingly critical, Option 2:

Have the customer themselves present cryptographic proof from their device. Proving that it’s them.

A new ‘Customer Present’ credential, bound to that device with a biometric that’s hard to fake.

We need to transfer the risk from the video (now easy to fake) to the device (much harder to fake). Today we ask, “Is this video real?”. Tomorrow we’ll ask, “Do we trust the linking of the face or fingerprint to this credential?”

What this demo video lays bare is that we can’t just use any camera or software, and hope the ‘live video’ is real. AI just killed that.

It’s why I’m bullish on ‘Customer Present’ as a new standard way to check who is really involved in a transaction.

And remember, the ‘take a video of yourself’ CX isn’t particularly great. Instead, we can just send the individual a private message to request their ‘Customer Present’ credential.

One tap to prove it’s you calling the contact centre, for example.

Helpfully, that’s precisely what’s being explored by the GSMA (the telco standards body). They are running a POC to test a ‘Customer Present’ approach to authentication.

If this can become an industry standard, it can work across all telcos. And I suspect banks too, once they realise how powerful ‘Customer Present’ will be.

I was with the team that first built these ‘Customer Present’ flows in 2018. But it’s now ready for prime time.

We. Must. Start. Digitally. Signing. Everything.

Including KYC videos.

It’s never been more important to understand the future of being a digital customer. So welcome back to the Customer Futures newsletter.

In this week’s edition:

• Turning consent boxes into customer contracts - IEEE’s MyTerms could be a game changer

• ChatGPT gets ads, but you’ve missed the bigger revenue story

• Google just announced Personal Intelligence - and Empowerment Tech just got into 1st gear

• … and much more

Let’s Go.

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Turning consent boxes into customer contracts - IEEE’s MyTerms could be a game changer

At over 7500 words, it takes 45 minutes to read TikTok’s terms of service. Microsoft is double that (over 15k words).

No one reads these things, of course. But they matter. They are written by lawyers, for lawyers.

But what if AI can help? It’s already excellent at condensing down large, dense texts into more easily digestible bites of information.

Here’s an example cookie policy, written by an AI, but for children:

“These cookie crumbs can track you as you move around the internet. When you visit different websites, they can see the crumbs left by other sites and learn a little bit about what you’re doing online.

“For example, they might know that you like cats because you visited a cat website, or that you’re interested in sports because you looked at some sports articles.

“Now, don’t worry! These cookie crumbs are not personal information like your name, address, or secrets. They are more like clues about your interests or the things you do online.

“Websites use this information to make your experience better. They might show you ads or recommend things that you might be interested in based on what they learn from the cookie crumbs.”

A fine effort. Making things more readable, more understandable.

But even so, will people actually read these polished versions?

Nope.

Surely my Personal AI can not only do it faster (in seconds, not 45 mins), but more importantly, can understand the T&Cs better than I can? And then help me decide - based on the preferences I feed it - if I even want to do business with this company, and steer me accordingly?

Feels pretty inevitable. But let’s go one step further.

So far, I’ve only described one side of the agreement. The user accepting terms from the business.

If my Personal Agent can read their user terms, surely a company’s AI can read my terms, too?

Eh? My terms?

It might sound fantastical and futuristic, but the standards body IEEE - the same folks that standardised things like WiFi - is about to announce exactly that.

A new online data agreements standard called P7012.

‘MyTerms’

Crazy? Well before CRM came along, the idea that companies could automatically deal with - and even personalise things - for millions of customers all at once was ludicrous.

So why not the other way round? Why not have millions of customers present their own terms, and have businesses automatically deal with them?

Of course, they can’t just be any terms. They’ll be standardised. The IEEE is proposing five of them, to be precise.

Turning rubbish and meaningless consent boxes into actual customer contracts and agreements.

It’s technical-ish, but worth understanding the IEEE’s high-level framework:

• Service Delivery (SD): A base-level ‘service delivery relationship’ agreement

• SD + Data Portability: A variant of the basic level agreement, but where the individual also wants to include data portability - their own copy of the data generated

• AI Data Sharing: The customer is willing to share specific data for the purposes of “Training and Operating AI technologies”

• Data For Good Sharing: The customer is willing to share specific data to enable a ‘Data for Good’ project

• Intent: Where customers can gather, curate and share standardised data about what they want and need

Why five?

Because when you zoom out, you’ll see that most people, most of the time, want the same sorts of things in these online agreements.

Look at it the other way round. Businesses negotiate T&Cs with each other all the time. But of course, it takes weeks and expensive lawyers. But that’s the shift: with AI Agents, we can not only read the user T&Cs, but can soon propose one of these five standard terms to businesses, on behalf of the user.

There’s a MyTerms launch event next week on the 28th January. I’ll be speaking, along with a fine lineup of experts, including Doc Searls (Customer Commons) and John Bruce (Tim-Berner’s Lee’s co-founder at Inrupt).

IEEE P7012, MyTerms, is all about making it easier for people to express what data they want - and don’t want - to be collected online.

And if you pay attention, MyTerms has the potential to replace much of the cookie banner nonsense.

And that alone makes it worth exploring MyTerms as a way to fix the consent mess we have today.

You can register for the event here.

MYTERMS, T&Cs WRITTEN FOR KIDS

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ChatGPT gets ads, but you’ve missed the bigger revenue story

You might have heard that ChatGPT is getting ads.

Because, well, personal data and advertising are commercial gravity. And Newton’s apple just fell on Sam Altman’s head.

Some people are pointing to the huge hole in OpenAI’s balance sheet, and why ads are a revenue rescue mission. Some are freaking out about data protection.

But we must think also about intimacy.

In the announcement, OpenAI says:

• Responses in ChatGPT will not be influenced by ads

• Ads are always separate and clearly labelled

• Your conversations are private from advertisers

Great! But look at what’s not said.

• Ads will be influenced by/ responses to your conversations

• Your conversations are not private from ChatGPT

Now think about:

1. How much ChatGPT will know about you

2. How well those ads can be placed (targeted)

Remember, ‘Search’ a la Yahoo and Google was a market breakthrough. Crawling the web, indexing what was available, and then surfacing answers to your questions as a ranked, prioritised set of links for you.

But it was pretty one-dimensional.

The response you’d get back was a flat list of links, likely ‘the top 10’. And therefore it became a fight over those top 10 links. And naturally, a $Bn market.

Now think about your own ChatGPT conversations:

• The richness and texture - not KeyWords

• The depth of content - not a list

• The data you’ve shared, and personal context - not just product names or symptom lists

• The conversational nature, the natural language - not the search box and lists

By definition, ChatGPT ads are going to be breathtakingly intimate.

I’m betting that ads in AI chat will be another commercial breakthrough. Likely surpassing what Google achieved with Search in 2006.

First, because of the precision. But second - and what everyone has missed - is that it’s about to fill the most important gap in Agentic Commerce. And the bigger revenue stream.

Triggering a Personal AI agent to go and get something done because of the ad.

In other words, to act on the ad, not just display it. You see, these moments are very near the start of the customer journey. The expression of intent.

Soon, you’ll be having a chat with AI, an ad will pop up related to your conversation. It’ll trigger curiosity for some, and they’ll instruct their AI agent to go find out more. Maybe even to purchase direct.

It’s the holy grail of digital advertising. Intent-advert-discover-purchase. And it’s about to become a new font of cash for OpenAI, which badly needs it right now.

Things are about to get wild, folks. And we just don’t know how it’ll turn out. But here’s the point.

‘Display ads’ are not where this ends up. That’s the 2008 framing of Altman-finally-does-ads.

Becoming the mouth of the Agentic Commerce river, sending customer AI agents downstream, direct to brands, who can respond with their own AI-enabled front doors, is.

Advertising might just become the most valuable move OpenAI makes this decade.

READ

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Google just announced Personal Intelligence - and Empowerment Tech just got into 1st gear

Linas Beliunas covers it pretty comprehensively:

“Everyone is racing to add “memory.” Chatbots remember chats, assistants store preferences, and apps learn inside their own walls.

“But Google did something else entirely. It flipped the switch on 20 years of your digital life. And it might be the deepest personalization layer ever built.

“Gemini can reason across:

• Your Gmail threads

• Your Photos library

• Your Search history

• Your YouTube watch patterns

“Every AI company now wants personalization. But personalization needs data gravity. And Google already has it. A decade of emails. Trillions of photos. Billions of searches. Behavioral signals at planetary scale.

“All first-party. All opt-in. All deeply integrated.

“No one else can copy this. OpenAI can’t read your Gmail, Anthropic can’t see your Photos, Perplexity only knows what happens inside its app.

“They start every conversation from zero. Google starts from you. The new battleground is all about who knows the user best.”

Exactly right.

Because for those paying attention, you already know that Personal AI is going to need three things:

1. Distribution (reach)

2. Context (data)

3. Permission (consent)

It’s Google bingo.

But don’t pretend they are playing 3D chess. The board was set years ago. They just turned it on when we were ready.

But.

Maybe we’re not ready? Millions of people already give Google their stuff. But will people give them even more access?

I wouldn’t bet against it.

I’ve long said that Google’s digital ID wallet will be the Google Maps of the 2020s. And their Personal AI play will be a force to be reckoned with.

They have the data, the reach, the insights, and most importantly, the permission to play.

Empowerment Tech just got into 1st gear.

Game on.

GOOGLE’S PERSONAL INTELLIGENCE, GOOGLE WALLET AS MAPS

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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: UCP is the new HTML for money READ

• Report: A Fieldguide to Digital Identity Standards Bodies READ

• Article: The Last Interface: You’ll never go to a search site again, ever go to Amazon, ever use a productivity app READ

• News: The UK Govt Abandons Mandatory Digital ID READ

• Post: Expedia’s AI planner failed - not because the AI was wrong, but because the experience wasn’t ready READ

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And that’s a wrap. Stay tuned for more Customer Futures soon, both here and over at LinkedIn.

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