Customer Futures Stories: AI Agents, Starbucks NFTs and Toxic Ad Models
Plus: LinkedIn identities, Private AI and a model for 'Zero Trust'
Hi everyone, thanks for coming back to Customer Futures. Each week I unpack the ever-increasing and disruptive shifts around digital customer relationships, personal data and customer engagement.
This is the weekly STORIES edition, covering the latest market developments. If you’re reading this and haven’t yet signed up, why not join hundreds of executives, entrepreneurs, designers, regulators and other digital leaders by clicking below. To the regular subscribers, thank you.
STORIES THIS WEEK
However you look at it, it’s now crystal clear that our Customer Future will be laced with - infused with - Artificial Intelligence.
Don’t worry, this regular feed of Customer Futures updates isn’t going to morph into ‘AI Futures’. But I’ll do my best to help you find the Customer signal in the deafening AI noise.
In this week’s edition:
Will personal AI become a swarm of ‘AI Agents’ working for you?
LinkedIn and Microsoft Entra introduce a new way to verify your workplace
The Surveillance Ad Model Is Toxic — Let’s Not Install Something Worse
Scammers used to just copy your credit card details… now they’ll copy a family member
Starbucks Loyalty Scheme based on NFTs… a breakthrough use case?
Private AI on devices - a new Moore’s Law?
… plus other links from around the web you don’t want to miss
Let’s go.
Will personal AI become a swarm of ‘AI Agents’ working for you?
Another week, another mind-bending AI capability is released. But this one might just have a huge impact on the future of customer engagement.
AutoGPT manages groups of AI bots that can perform any number of tasks for you: messaging, desktop research, purchasing, creating new content, you name it.
These autonomous AI agents can be given a task, and will independently work out for themselves how to complete it. Even spawning additional AI bots to do the work. They can act independently, collaborate with each other, learn and even have long-term memory.
A small but excellent example: Auto-GPT can write its own code, recursively debug and then self-improve. Some more simple examples are listed here.
So far, so business-orientated. Now imagine running AutoGPT on the customer side. It turns out that AI can not only chat, it can now DO.
It’s very, very early for this new autonomous AI tech, but the potential is there to change customer interactions in new and unexpected ways. As I said in my recent post, it’s going to be customers themselves that redefine customer engagement.
LinkedIn and Microsoft Entra introduce a new way to verify your workplace
Microsoft’s $26BN purchase of LinkedIn in 2016 left many scratching their head. What was the customer benefit? What was the product strategy? I suspect it’s been a happy accident that for the last few years Microsoft has been working on (their own flavour of) verifiable credentials: Entra Verified ID.
So it was only a matter of time before their work on portable digital identity and LinkedIn collided. Last week’s announcement brought them together in a predicted but still exciting development: ‘Verified Workplace ID’.
In my view, this marks an important turning point in the digital identity market.
I’ve long said that digital wallets have a distribution problem.
In larger economies, over a third of people work for big enterprises. And when you consider that Office 365 enjoys nearly 50% marketshare, the addressable market for a new portable employee ID becomes absolutely massive. (At last count Microsoft has over 350M active users).
Suddenly the position and power of LinkedIn takes on a whole new perspective. A whole new distribution strategy.
Now, Microsoft is a big beast. And a slow one. And when an elephant moves around in a small room, it will inevitably knock some things over. This announcement will makes waves across the emerging market for digital wallets and verifiable credentials.
But here’s what’s interesting: The superpower of verifiable credentials is data portability. The ability to prove anything about you, to anyone else, anywhere. Including beyond Microsoft.
Meaning, the whole ecosystem around verifiable data just expanded. And if the market-wide work on standards and interoperability continues, then potentially:
Anyone, anywhere should be able to verify workplace identities; and
Soon, other digital wallets *should just work* with the Microsoft Office suite.
Yes, this will mean verifiable work histories on LinkedIn (finally!). And yes it will mean more trusted interactions with other professionals, for example when hiring or meeting new contacts at conferences.
But more broadly, this has the potential to mean a step change in the adoption - and visibility - of verifiable credentials and digital wallets. And that can only be a good thing.
One to watch.
The Surveillance Ad Model Is Toxic — Let’s Not Install Something Worse
This is a brilliant, and must-read summary on the next generation of customer tracking and ads. Elizabeth Renieris cautions how, as we move away from third-party cookies and tracking (especially mobile device identifiers), we must take care to avoid implementing something that’s even worse.
“…the shift away from third-party cookies on the Web and third-party tracking of mobile device identifiers does not equate to the end of tracking or even targeted ads; it just changes who is doing the tracking or targeting and how they go about it. Specifically, it doesn’t provide any privacy protections from first parties, who are more likely to be hegemonic platforms with the most user data…”
Scammers used to just copy your credit card details… now they’ll copy a family member
Scammers are pretty sophisticated at faking customer messages (like this recent PayPal example). I’ve long said that the challenges around targeted personal data attacks aren’t so much about hacking a ‘back door’. The bigger risk is really you: hackers manipulating you personally, as a ‘front door’.
It’s a version of social engineering, where the bad actors persuade you to give up personal information so they can use it elsewhere and pretend to be you. But now that AI-based voice clones are freely available in the wild, it’s much worse than just a fake email. That ‘front door’ could well be a family member.
An extreme version of this just happened: using a voice clone, a fraudster pretended to have kidnapped someone’s daughter, then demanded a ransom.
We’re not in Kansas anymore, people. We’re going to need new digital plumbing to know who - and what - we’re dealing with, both online and on the phone.
Starbucks Loyalty Scheme based on NFTs… a breakthrough use case?
NFTs are following their own hype cycle, and many high-profile projects have come and gone. But alongside Spotify and Ticketmaster, both working on ‘NFTs-as-access’, there’s been a strong undercurrent around using ‘NFTs-as-engagement’. Specifically to reboot digital loyalty. Starbucks may have something special here, and is worth a look as a potential breakthrough use case.
I consider this to be a ‘v1’ of this customer engagement innovation, rather than the final destination. My bet is that soon we’ll add more mature, more portable and more privacy-preserving tech to prove things about customers, and the traditional loyalty market may be turned upside down. I’d say within 3 years.
Pay attention to Verifiable Credentials, Digital Wallets, Smart Agents and Zero-Knowledge Proofs. The good news is that these are all based on new standards, making it easier - and therefore more likely - for enterprise to adopt.
Private AI on devices - a new Moore’s Law?
In 1965 Gordon Moore predicted that computer chip performance would double every year. He was right, and for decades it’s been more or less a consistent annual trend - famously now called ‘Moore’s Law’. It accounts for why today we have more computing power in our pockets than NASA had in 1969 to land a man on the moon.
Now, I don’t have any data on this, but it feels like there’s a sort of hyper-speed Moore's Law happening around ‘AI at the edge’ i.e. private AI on your mobile or laptop.
But instead of yearly performance improvement, it’s monthly.
The development of AI capabilities on device just seems to be getting faster and faster. We’re getting whiplash just trying to keep up.
A good example is TurboPilot, a clone of GitHub’s ‘CoPilot’ AI developer tool, which can now run easily on your own laptop, rather that using the centralised AI platform.
Another is Dolly from Databricks. Nearly as capable as OpenAI, but run locally on your device. Astonishing stuff.
What’s this got to do with Customer Futures? Here’s the customer twist I see coming: read the Dolly product overview below… but where they write ‘company’ (and ‘organization’), swap that for ‘individual’ and you’ll see what I mean:
“There are many reasons a company would prefer to build their own model rather than sending data to a centralized LLM provider that serves a proprietary model behind an API. For many companies, the problems and datasets most likely to benefit from AI represent their most sensitive and proprietary intellectual property, and handing it over to a third party may be unpalatable. Furthermore, organizations may have different tradeoffs in terms of model quality, cost, and desired behavior. We believe that most ML users are best served long term by directly owning their models.”
The potential here for customer-owned, and customer-defined AI is massive. And all coming to a device near you soon…
OTHER THINGS
As ever, there are far too many interesting and important Customer Future things to track. Here are some other links worth checking out:
Two of my favourite people, Doc Searls (VRM) and Rand Hindi (Privacy DeepTech), discussing the next big thing in privacy technology: Homomorphic Encryption WATCH
Meta (gets away with) $725 Million Fine for abusing customer data. (No accountability for Zuckerberg/Sandberg, no admission of liability. Sigh). READ
Coverage of the 2023 Digital Identity Landscape from Liminal WATCH
‘Zero Trust’ Maturity Model from the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA), covering identity, devices and data READ
Autonomous DIDs Identifiers for Organisations READ
LloydsPharmacy shared private customer information like Viagra purchases with TikTok and Facebook for targeted advertising READ
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