Digital Wallets For Online Porn Age Checks, Personalised AI Assistants Will Get Wild And Weird, and Automated Job Applications Will Become An HR Headache
Digital Wallets For Online Porn Age Checks, Personalised AI Assistants Will Get Wild And Weird, and Automated Job Applications Will Become An HR Headache
Plus: The Risk of Mass Persuasion, The Identity Century and How long until we get AI-powered reputation badges?
Hi everyone, thanks for coming back to Customer Futures. Each week I unpack the disruptive shifts around digital wallets, Personal AI and digital customer relationships.
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Welcome back. Here’s this week’s mini perspective:
Digital wallets are soon going to move from ‘offence’ to ‘defence’.
What does that mean?
Offence in digital is about improving things. Better conversion. Smarter UX. Faster. Cheaper. Seamless. Private. Portable.
Whereas defence in digital is about protection and risk. Where did this data come from? Is this person really entitled to do this, and go there? Can I trust this interaction? Did this happen? Who am I really dealing with?
I’ve been cooking on this idea of wallets-as-risk-management for a while.
But the latest demo video from new AI darling ‘Pika’ changed the game.
If their incredible new text-to-video platform can do even 10% of what they’re promising, we are in for a wild ride.
New levels of storytelling? 100%.
Mind-blowing creative? Yes.
Emotional engagement? Absolutely.
A complete collapse of trust in the content we see and hear, because we can't tell where (or how) it was made? Or by whom?
Also yes.
Pika have blown the doors off what most thought was possible. And the company is less than a year old.
The implication?
Digital identity wallets will not be about portable digital ID.
Not at first anyway.
Nor will they be about features like messaging. Or about signing. Or loyalty.
They're first going to become about protection and risk.
We're going to need our digital wallets first to CONNECT us, then to PROTECT us.
Only once we have those things in place - trusted connections and data - then we'll get all the good stuff.
The digital growth. The digital empowerment. The digital sovereignty.
Put simply, in the first wave of digital wallet adoption we’ll use them to CONNECT AND PROTECT.
Here’s another reason why I think I’m right: Loss Aversion.
It’s a proven and well-accepted human bias. Where individuals feel the pain of loss twice as intensively as the equivalent pleasure of gain.
In other words, we try to avoid losses twice as much as we seek gains.
So when it comes to digital wallets and digital ID, we should expect people to value digital protection twice as much as digital growth.
This isn’t a new idea. I’ve written about it before:
RegTech’s Quiet Backdoor to Wallet Adoption (wallets leading on compliance)
I don’t just want my bank to fight fraud - I want my digital wallet to help too (wallets leading on fraud prevention)
It’s going to be a crazy few years as the market figures this all out.
Yes, digital wallets, verifiable credentials and zero-knowledge proofs are going to be central to creating value in the new digital economy.
But we should assume that the new digital value will first be about lowering risk, not just driving growth.
Welcome back to the future of being a digital customer. And welcome back to the Customer Futures newsletter.
In this week’s edition
The Risk of Mass Persuasion
How long until we get AI-powered reputation badges… Airbnb has already started
You.AI - a Personal AI on tap
Amazon, Expedia and Trustpilot unite to fight fake reviews
Automated Job Applications Will Become An HR Headache
The Identity Century Is Here
Lessons on building a viral consumer app: The story of Saturn
UK Regulator Recommends Digital Wallets For Online Pornography Age Checks
… plus other links about the future of digital customers you don’t want to miss
Let’s Go.
The Risk of Mass Persuasion
From the Future of Marketing Institute:
“After all, a superintelligence, by definition, will be an AI system that is significantly smarter than any human. And if such an AI system goes rogue, it will not need to take control over our nukes or military drones.
“It will just need to use the tactics that Big Tech is currently developing — the ability to deploy personalized AI agents that seem so friendly and nonthreatening that we let down our guard, allowing them to whisper in our ears while reading our emotions, predicting our actions, and potentially manipulating our behavior with super-human skill.
“Today’s AI agents are already so good at pretending to be human, even by text chat, we’re trusting them more than we should.
“So when these powerful AI systems eventually appear to us as Snoop Dogg or Paris Hilton or some new fictional persona that’s friendly and charming, we will only let down our guard even more.”
In other words, the biggest AI risk isn’t about a new ‘super-intelligence’. It’s that over time we’ll trust AI recommendations more and more.
The AIs only need to be 1% better than a recommendation from a human. Over the medium term, the AIs will win.
Well, let’s be more precise. Who wins?
Whoever owns and runs the AI.
A gentle reminder of the Customer Futures soapbox: Digital Intimacy is A Greater Risk Than Digital Privacy.
Now ask yourself:
What if your customer had a personal AI whispering in their ear? What would it honestly say about your company, products and services? What would be the impact on customer satisfaction, or reviews?
How might you change your own behaviour day-to-day as a customer if you had instant, always-on, hyper-personalised recommendations that served you, not (just) the businesses you deal with?
How long until we get AI-powered reputation badges… Airbnb has already started
PhocusWire reports:
“In the same week Airbnb’s Plus program officially shut down, the company is launching a new “Guest Favorites” badge that will be automatically added – and removed – from properties through an artificial intelligence-powered system.
“Airbnb says it has about 7 million properties on its site and about 2 million of those are marked as “Guest Favorites” as of the launch Wednesday. Users can filter their search to find these properties.
“But the designation is not guaranteed for any set time. Airbnb head of global operations Tara Bunch said the system is dynamic and badging may change daily.
“[AI] tools will look at all these different areas like the quality rating, the cancellation rate, [customer service] tickets, all of the subcategories – cleanliness, accuracy, location, value, etc.,” she said.”
Interesting, and likely very helpful for Airbnb’s customers to discover, filter and navigate Airbnb properties.
Question: How long until those ‘dynamic badges’ are allocated to you, the guest? And all calculated by AI? Perhaps they are already?
It’s an interesting area to explore. And also a slippery slope. Not so different from your passenger rating in Uber. Or your eBay seller reputation.
But this time powered by AI.
I can see a world where platforms will offer both ‘automated reputation badges’ (provided by a reputation bot), and also ‘personal reputation vouches’ from others in your network.
You can decide which to add to your profile, and which to decline.
Today Airbnb’s property reputation badges are automated. And property owners don’t get a say.
But in my (imaginary) guest reputation use case, consumers would have to have the option to accept or reject proposed badges. And they could never be used legally to discriminate against guests.
As we digitise the customer journey we can begin to track and manage every customer touchpoint.
Now sprinkle over a healthy dose of AI pixie dust, make some inferences, offer targeted recommendations and ‘customer scoring’, and digital reputation becomes a Big Deal.
Now ask yourself
Could ‘personal badges and vouches’ - much like AirBnb’s property reputation badges - help individuals discover new people, places and experts?
How long until these kinds of reputation badges are calculated by default? How will people feel about it? How will the regulators feel about it?
Won’t our Personal AIs do this anyway, unprompted, on the customer side? Scanning your personal network and ‘scoring’ others privately? When you ask it ‘who should I meet next’?, the AI runs that question over your personal LLM… automatically ‘grades’ your interactions with others as positive or negative, and makes the recommendation. Assuming it’s not used in a regulated use case, perhaps to help you with a personal or professional introduction, what are the ethical and legal issues?
You.AI - a Personal AI on tap
I’m keeping a close eye on You.AI. They’ve built an impressive platform where anyone can build a custom (personal) AI.
A bit like OpenAI’s AI marketplace, but with apps developed higher up the stack, in the Application Layer. Abstracted away from the different public AI models.
And bundled with smart configuration and payment options, to help AI creators publish their own AI tools wherever they want.
It means that anyone, even with no coding experience, can turn text prompts into a simple consumer application. And with a much easier interface, accessible to the mass market.
Here’s what You.AI says is different about their platform:
Your users won't be required to sign into ChatGPT, can just use your AI directly
You can embed your AI in your own website
You get powerful analytics of how people are using it
You get to choose if they can use it for free, or charge a monthly sub.
You can use OpenAI, Anthropic, Google models
You can do multi-step workflows (make much more sophisticated AIs)”
Now ask yourself
When your customers can easily develop their own AIs using tools like these, could these marketplaces become a new route for digital customer engagement?
If customers develop their own AIs trained on the real use of your products, how will that change the customer journey? Could it help with customer service? Or managing complaints? Or simply product discovery and reviews? What are the risks there? Who owns the IP?
Amazon, Expedia and Trustpilot unite to fight fake reviews
The BBC reports that Amazon, Booking.com, Expedia, Tripadvisor and TrustPilot are now working together to fight fake online reviews.
“The cross-sector group will fight the fraudsters by:
agreeing industry-wide standards on what constitutes a fake review
sharing best practice on hosting and moderating online reviews
sharing intelligence on companies selling fake reviews and businesses trying to use them to improve their reputations.”
So far, so business-centric.
What if you could only submit an online review if you had to prove you had the receipt, or that you really were there?
Consider this: each review site doesn’t actually need to know who I am. Nor when or how or even where I experienced it/ bought it.
Just that I did, and can prove it.
For it to work anywhere, not just at these mega platforms, we’d need vast amounts of verifiable customer data, accessible online.
Of course, this is just another opportunity for portable and private verifiable credentials.
Now, this lets-join-forces-to-tackle-the-fake-reviews scheme is great. And about time. But a handful of large providers can’t, by definition, cover all online reviews.
Instead, there needs to be an approach that’s easy to use. One that’s available to everyone and all platforms. And likely based on open standards so that any company can simply integrate reviews from verified customers.
It’s already clear that AI platforms will soon start pumping out waves of fake customer reviews. So businesses are going to need their own defences. Including new levels of authentic customer data to win the fake review war.
Now ask yourself
How might we use digital wallets and watermarks to enable legit customers to post trustworthy reviews?
What happens when it all falls apart and we can’t trust online content at all? We’ll soon see highly realistic ‘customer’ photos and videos, showing people using your company’s products, but actually generated by a malicious AI. Specifically designed to mess with your SEO, product reviews and rankings.
And what about the other way around? How might your company prove that it’s the real organisation when sending messages to customers? Including offers and account updates? Could digital wallets help you build trust and grow your revenues?
Automated Job Applications Will Become An HR Headache
Most job applications today mean emailing the HR team or agency with a CV.
What happens when my Personal AI can apply for 1000 jobs at a time? Bulk AI job applications are right around the corner. And it’s going to cause a big headache for HR teams everywhere.
Until, one assumes, those same HR teams use their own ‘HR co-pilot’.
To handle the influx of AI-powered applications. Helping them screen and summarise those emails and PDF attachments on their behalf. (Though not making actual hiring decisions of course… they’d never do that…)
Here’s the point: It’s only a short hop to get rid of those email applications altogether.
HR teams will soon offer different channels to apply for a job:
Tired: Send us an email with a PDF attachment (tired)
Wired: Scan this QR code and send us your identity and verifiable CV
Next-gen: Auto-apply with your Personal AI… simply toggle the ‘interested in new roles’ settings to ON… and let your AI make suggestions for relevant openings… with all the relevant (but minimised) details sent directly to the company’s HR platform
As Bronwyn Williams puts it: “Arms race to the bottom? Or super-efficient perfect market economy ahead?”
Now ask yourself
How will digital wallets transform the employee journey? From hire to fire? Is this just the start of showing how Personal AI will dial up workplace disruption to 11?
Are HR functions ready for this? How will legacy HR systems cope with the coming ‘digital big bang’? A tsunami of instantly verifiable employee data, together with near-complete process automation from end-to-end?
The Identity Century Is Here
Tracey Follows just won Best Technology Podcast at the Independent Podcast Awards. Quite rightly, for her brilliant work covering emerging tech, especially around digital identity.
I was delighted to be one of Tracey’s podcast guests this year. But that’s not why I’m pointing it out.
It’s actually to recommend you check out her latest masterpiece: The Identity Century.
One of the best collections of ideas, stories and perspectives on digital ID I’ve seen.
It’s about how we got here. What’s wrong today. And where things are going. It’s 100 slides long and brilliantly explains why Identity is the defining - and most existential - issue of the 21st Century.
Tracey argues that identity is the root cause of so many of our social and economic challenges today. And that it’s all now under the direct influence of widespread digitisation and company control.
“The effects will last a century. As should the analysis. Right now, you need to prepare for full-scale profilicity. Authenticity now misses the mark. Plurality is reality. AI = Artificial Identity.
“Analogue identity and digital identity will need to reconcile. From now on, identity will lie at the heart of every connection people make, everything people do and everywhere people go.
“With pseudonymous identities that 'protect' them, avatars that 'express' them, credentials that 'authenticate' them, and agents that 'expand' or 'enhance' them, every person is affected. We are all about to embark on the Identity Century.”
The work speaks for itself. Go read it, then follow the rest of Tracey’s work online.
You won’t regret it.
Lessons on building a viral consumer app: The story of Saturn
Co-founders Dylan Diamond and Max Baron developed a new calendar app, Saturn, in 2019. It now has 1.6M users and has stayed at the top of the app charts for some time.
Impressive stuff.
They’ve written a long but brilliant piece about the most important lessons when building a viral social consumer app.
It’s a Must Read.
Especially if you are developing any kind of consumer-grade digital identity service, a Personal AI platform, or otherwise exploring B2C, or indeed ‘Me2B’, products.
The article covers:
Embracing single-player mode as a wedge for social products
Building a product that users feel was built just for them
Why it’s OK to be unscalable—you can make it scale later
Building a familiar product is much easier if you’re solving a problem you’ve experienced
Playing the long game
Worth your time.
UK Regulator Recommends Digital Wallets For Online Pornography Age Checks
The UK communications regulator Ofcom has just set out guidance on what makes a ‘highly effective age check’.
The aim is to stop children from accessing adult services online. There’s a range of methods proposed, including photo ID matching, facial age estimation and credit card checks.
It’s part of the UK’s Online Safety Act. Where sites and apps that display or publish pornographic content “must ensure that children are not normally able to encounter pornography on their service”
The regulator says:
“Websites must introduce 'age assurance' – through age verification, age estimation or a combination of both – which is ‘highly effective’ at correctly determining whether a user is a child or not.
“Effective access controls should prevent children from encountering pornographic content on that service.”
The reason to include this here is that Ofcom has, for the first time, now included Digital Identity Wallets as a means of safe age verification.
“Digital Identity Wallets: Using a variety of methods, including those listed above users can securely store their age in a digital format, which the user can then share with the online pornography service.”
I’m not going to go into the merits and justifications for online age verification. Nor about security and privacy. Or about the rights of citizens.
All of which have been written about at length elsewhere.
But will say that digital wallets might just be a way through the online verification mess.
Where individuals can present facts about themselves (IS-OVER-18), rather than the raw data (date of birth).
A digital wallet approach will be much safer - and more private - than an API call to your bank every time you want to watch porn online.
Apparently “Approval by the bank can be taken as evidence that the user is over 18.”
Goodness me. For any bank offering this service, I guess it’s another juicy attribute for the credit score. PornCheck_Rating_Frequency.
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:
Personalized AI assistants will get wild, and weird, soon READ
Instant Identification Means Instant Payments READ
Hacker stole data of 6.9 million 23andMe customers and then put it up for sale online READ
Trusted Transactions powered by decentralized identity and payment wallets WATCH
Anonymesh: Data sharing meets privacy and security READ
Amazon launches secure, palm-based identity service for enterprise access control READ
The Rise of Autonomous Agents READ
He Wanted Privacy. His College Gave Him None READ
And that’s a wrap. Stay tuned for more Customer Futures soon, both here and over at LinkedIn.
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