Customer Futures Stories: Utah's porn problem, paying with your palm and surveillance in the EU
Plus: Advertising coming to ChatGPT, training your Personal Digital Agent and Apple shifting the entire Personal AI landscape
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 important, and sometimes less obvious, updates from the market. 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
This week we zoom out a bit from AI. Looking at some of the wider trends impacting the future of digital customer relationships. From online age checks and digital advertising to new ways to pay. As AI disruption rumbles on, is ‘Personal AI’ the hot ticket?
Welcome back to the Customer Futures newsletter.
In this week’s edition:
Amazon using your palm for payments
Big Desks and Little People
Apple has the potential to shift the entire Personal AI landscape
Advertisers: Treat data like we treat ESG… don't hide under privacy tech
Utah’s porn problem raises privacy questions… and an opportunity?
Advertising is coming to ChatGPT
What if you could digitise your mind? Training your Personal Digital Agent
… plus other links from around the web you don’t want to miss
Let’s go.
Amazon using your palm for payments
Starbucks is piloting Amazon One, Amazon’s biometric payment system, in Seattle.
“Through Amazon One, Amazon aims to streamline the process so when consumers get to the kiosk to pay for their goods, it’s as convenient as possible. Consumers are first encouraged to sign-up for the system either by enrolling through the Amazon One site or at the Amazon One kiosk. Once at the kiosk, consumers scan a barcode and then scan both of their palms.”
What can be automated, will be automated. Are the expectations of ‘seamless’ going to crowd out the innovations around ‘private’? READ
Big Desks and Little People
When Daniel Hardman writes, you pay attention. His latest on the (technology) power imbalance on the internet:
“Although we definitely want trusted interactions with orgs, we shouldn’t need to be little people clients of big desk servers every time we want a trusted and interoperable digital interaction. Building infrastructure that imposes this requirement may not be evil, but it’s risky, in exactly the way that More and Orwell and Acton warn about.
If we continue on our current trajectory, I worry that we’ll have authentic, confidential, and private interactions — but only with or through orgs that bully and marginalize and exploit us. That might be a world where orgs can trust people, but it’s not one where people can trust orgs. It doesn’t fix our broken internet.”
Businesses spend millions every year to verify and trust customers and their personal data. But what if people could trust organisations too? I’m with Daniel on this one. It’s time to reboot, restore and reimagine our digital connections. READ
Apple has the potential to shift the entire Personal AI landscape
AI is about to go local: on your device, in the browser, wherever you are. With WebGPT, you can now run a powerful AI assistant in the browser. No API needed. And it takes about 15 seconds to see the inevitable entry of Apple into the Personal AI race. As Sully Omarr puts it:
“Everyone is talking about OpenAI, Microsoft and Stability as a huge AI player. But there is one company that arguable the best positioned in the space, and they dont even have an LLM offering yet. Apple has the potential to shift the entire AI landscape
[…] A highly optimized and tuned LLM that runs on your device? Well that opens up quite a lot of possibilities. Some benefits include: No network lag, no internet connection needed, and it's free to run. So why would Apple benefit from a small, optimized LLM? They have nearly 2B active devices worldwide that they could potentially ship an AI assistant to.”
Things are about to get interesting. WEBGPT, APPLE’S OPP
Advertisers: Treat data like we treat ESG… don't hide under privacy tech
The IAB and its advertising ecosystem are scrambling to navigate Australia’s proposed new Privacy Act. Not surprising when only 9% of Australians are comfortable with targeted advertising and online surveillance.
Rather than a ‘let’s bolt-on privacy’ approach, what if the response to consumer trust and privacy became part of a company’s wider brand strategy? A bit like ESG initiatives. As one ‘data clean room’ firm put it at the recent IAB Australia Privacy and Data Summit:
“We should think about privacy like we think about all of our ESG [environmental, social and corporate governance]. What's the best I can do? What's the most privacy compliant or privacy capable I can be? How can I show the most respect to my clients, my customers, my partners around that data rather than what's the minimum I can get away? That will require a major mindset shift – and neither the adtech industry nor marketers are there yet.” PRIVACY ESG, OZ PRIVACY ACT
Utah’s porn problem raises privacy questions… and an opportunity?
Checking the age of users online isn’t easy. It’s also expensive from a customer experience and trust point of view. So most businesses go for a ‘check-box’ option (self-declaration) over the traditional digital ‘government document’ (date of birth check).
Digital age checks have become the poster child for the fight between user safety (who is using our services?) vs. privacy (what about surveillance and free speech?).
Utah has introduced a new age verification law, and it’s triggering a nationwide push to look deeper at the issue. The debates raise the usual questions about personal data, digital privacy and how to do this at scale.
Now the porn industry is suing in Utah (surveillance! privacy!), while others see it as an opportunity to drive the adoption of Self Sovereign Identity (SSI). Because of course, it’s a false choice: we need digital safety AND privacy.
Rather than (just) rely on today’s clumsy business-side checks, what if governments endorsed consumer-side digital tools that can hold trusted data, like an I-AM-OVER-18 credential? NATIONAL US PUSH, UTAH PORN LAWSUIT, SSI OPP
Advertising is coming to ChatGPT
What happens when you combine ‘AI-enabled, first-party Customer Data Platforms’ (ad engines) with ‘AI-based chat and search functionality’?
Apparently you get ‘highly-targeted advertising experiences’ based on customer chat sessions. A fertile area for revenue growth at Microsoft, now that they’ve added OpenAI to Bing search. Meanwhile, developers will just drop traditional ad links directly into our AI chat interfaces, next to prompts.
Whichever way you look at it, digital ads and chat-based ad surveillance are coming at us fast (the next privacy frontier?).
As Robert Scoble (massively understating the issue) comments:
“I spoke at Google’s first advertiser conference long ago and saw what advertising did to pay for lots of things I enjoy. I just hope we get a much better kind of advertising in the AI world than we have now.” ADS IN BING, CHATGPT ADS, SCOBLE
What if you could digitise your mind? Training your Personal Digital Agent
If a Personal AI is working for only you, then how do you train it? Enter You.AI, a new venture to ‘digitise your mind’.
“By creating a Digital Mental Model, we create a dataset that is used to train our Personal Digital Agent—able to dramatically change the way we engage with all information technology, making us radically more powerful and productive…
“[…] if we train a Personal Digital Agent to understand our desires, preferences, sensibilities, commitments, and all other facets of ourselves, it can leverage recent advancements in Generative AI models to perform the same kinds of functions as a human concierge—orders of magnitude faster and more efficiently.” READ
OTHER THINGS
There are far too many interesting and important Customer Future things to include in this edition, so here are some more links to chew on:
The Power of Decentralised Identifiers WATCH
EU privacy regulators to create Task Force to investigate ChatGPT READ
A Shift in the Trust Model Brought by Verifiable Credentials READ
India approves 22 financial entities to perform Aadhaar biometric authentication READ
US to EU: We want to check your surveillance practices READ
PolygonID Zero-Knowledge Identity for Web2 & Web3 WATCH
The re-bundling of financial services and the SuperApp race are defining the next phase of the fintech (r)evolution READ
Thanks for reading this week’s edition! If you’ve enjoyed it, and want to learn more about the future of digital customer relationships, personal data and digital engagement, then why not subscribe: