Does Empowerment Tech mean ‘Post Web’, and what happens when my Personal AI takes over my computer?
Plus: Apple adds Homomorphic Encryption and nobody noticed, and will we see an 'everything wallet'?
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Each week I unpack the disruptive shifts around digital wallets, Personal AI and digital customer relationships.
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Another packed week for Empowerment Tech.
In this week’s edition:
What happens when my Personal AI takes over my computer?
Does Empowerment Tech mean ‘Post Web’?
Apple adds Homomorphic Encryption - and nobody noticed
Will we soon see an 'everything wallet'?
I Took a ‘Decision Holiday’ and Put A.I. in Charge of My Life
… and much more
Let’s Go.
What happens when my Personal AI takes over my computer?
Anthropic has released a new feature for its ‘Claude’ platform. The AI can constantly scan a user’s PC screen to automate actions in the browser or on the desktop.
Claude can now click, type and make decisions.
“Available today on the API, developers can direct Claude to use computers the way people do—by looking at a screen, moving a cursor, clicking buttons, and typing text. Claude 3.5 Sonnet is the first frontier AI model to offer computer use in public beta.
“At this stage, it is still experimental—at times cumbersome and error-prone. We're releasing computer use early for feedback from developers, and expect the capability to improve rapidly over time."
“Asana, Canva, Cognition, DoorDash, Replit, and The Browser Company have already begun to explore these possibilities, carrying out tasks that require dozens, and sometimes even hundreds, of steps to complete.”
You can instantly imagine form filling and Claude making bookings and payments for you. It’s very clearly an early Empowerment Tech tool in action.
My reaction?
On one hand, it’s ludicrous.
Why constrain a computer’s interactions to human forms and tickboxes? Where the computer is limited to visual steps and overly-simplistic tasks that are designed expressly for customers who usually make mistakes and get lost in a process?
Rather, AI agents need their own interfaces, channels and agreements with businesses. And of course each other.
But.
On the other hand, this is about meeting people where they already are. It’s often a requirement for the mass adoption of new tech.
Why?
If we want to give computers their own interfaces, channels and agreements, we’ll need the market need to sign up to interoperability standards. And that takes years, uncomfortable compromise and business integrations.
Yes, AI might accelerate some of the hard work. Quickly mapping how AI agents can work with each other, and write code for business integration. But that will take time.
In the short term, AI Agent ‘interop’ will likely be a blocker to adoption for both businesses and customers.
Innovation won’t wait for those standards.
So here’s another way to look at Claude’s ‘Computer Use’ mode.
One of the most important AI breakthroughs has been cracking human language. GPT models have been around for years, with little adoption outside the lab.
They required deep technical skills and high-priests of AI who understood the secret steps to make it all work.
Now we can just talk to our AI tools.
The chat interface has been the real shift. It’s why ChatGPT has been the fastest-adopted technology in history. Langauge interfaces has made AI accessible for 100s of millions of people. None of whom need to know what a training model is. Or how to spell LLM.
AI is now conversational.
So I see Claude’s new Computer Use an adoption thing. This new interaction mode just made Personal AI accessible for millions of people. It just gave Personal AI distribution.
Anthropic is bringing AI to where people already are. Without needing customers to jump through hoops or use a cool new interface. Just like Apple has added Intelligence to the same iOS interfaces we already use, and Meta adding AI to the existing WhatsApp search bar.
At some point, and once things like agent-to-agent comms standards are ironed out, autonomous AI agents will have their own direct and private channels to the businesses I deal with. They’ll have their own digital identities, digital wallets, verifiable credentials and data stores.
And we’ll have Empowerment Tech at scale.
In that new world my AI doesn’t need to mess about with my mouse and keyboard. But for now, Claude is a small step in the right direction.
But over time, it’s going to have a big impact.
Does Empowerment Tech mean ‘Post Web’?
Outlier Ventures was the first dedicated Web3 venture studio. And its CEO Jamie Burke has been ahead of the curve ever since.
His new online series covers the convergence of Crypto and AI. And now following 80+ interviews with web3 leaders, he’s concluded that the next phase in the digital economy is so transformational that it won’t be Web4 or Web5.
It will be ‘Post Web’.
“Where Web1 gave us [Read], Web2 [Write], Web3 [Own], The Post Web means we can now [Delegate] ever more of our lives to agents that will live, work and coordinate on blockchains.
“This will dramatically reduce our experience of the Web from the death of Search, to interruptive advertising and even websites and applications, flipping us from The Attention Economy to The Intention Economy; a highly contextual, deterministic yet adaptive, verifiable machine-optimized internet.”
I think Burke is spot on.
That’s because he’s describing Empowerment Tech. The convergence of Personal AI Agents, Digital Wallets and Data Vaults/Stores.
There’s a lot to dig into here, including the impact on ‘brand’ (my agent won’t care about your fancy adverts) and websites-as-the-channel will fade. We’ll see a shift away from ‘search’, and web2 sites won’t be so attractive as a ‘destination’ anymore.
More on that soon. For now, I highly recommend reading Outlier’s predictions about the future of digital customer relationships.
It’s all very ‘Customer Futures’.
Apple adds Homomorphic Encryption - and nobody noticed
This is a big deal. But as I’ve written before, it’s very much below the waterline. Invisible to most users.
“By performing computations locally on a user’s device, we help minimize the amount of data that is shared with Apple or other entities.
“Of course, a user may request on-device experiences powered by machine learning (ML) that can be enriched by looking up global knowledge hosted on servers. To uphold our commitment to privacy while delivering these experiences, we have implemented a combination of technologies to help ensure these server lookups are private, efficient, and scalable.
“One of the key technologies we use to do this is homomorphic encryption (HE), a form of cryptography that enables computation on encrypted data.
“HE is designed so that a client device encrypts a query before sending it to a server, and the server operates on the encrypted query and generates an encrypted response, which the client then decrypts. The server does not decrypt the original request or even have access to the decryption key, so HE is designed to keep the client query private throughout the process.”
Oddly, I’ve seen very little of this announcement online. Perhaps because it’s kind of a technical, nerdy article. But as I’ve written before, privacy tech like Homomorphic Encryption (HE) is coming. And now it’s coming to Apple, at scale.
Can you see the threads coming together?
Digital wallets with secure, portable and private digital ID
Personal storage and vaults
Small Language Models and on-device LLMs
Privacy-enabled cloud AI using HE
The most interesting bit is that Apple has open sourced its Swift implementation of HE. Meaning it’s now available to all app developers:
“Introducing HE into the Apple ecosystem provides the privacy protections that make it possible for us to enrich on-device experiences with private server look-ups.
“To make it easier for the developer community to similarly adopt HE for their own applications, we have open-sourced swift-homomorphic-encryption, an HE library.”
The path to Empowerment Tech is getting clearer.
And Apple is opening the door.
HE AT APPLE, APPLE’S ‘SWIFT’ IMPLEMENTATION
Will we soon see an 'everything wallet'?
This week Simon Taylor asked his network if soon we’ll see an ‘everything wallet’. Where payment apps and digital wallets converge.
My take is that more likely we'll see the 'everything agent' that deals with my multiple wallets.
Why?
Because 'digital wallet' just means 'cryptographically provable'. Wallets can store whatever data they need. From a customer point of view, I won’t need to worry about which specific does what. Instead it should come down to context (what data), brand (what trust) and relationship (what interaction).
So how will our digital wallets interact with businesses, and each other? I have some questions:
1. Which wallet?
With payment wallets we can store 'proof of money/account'. With digital ID wallets we can store 'proof of attributes' (personal data). So we're going to see wallets everywhere, and I suspect will use multiple of them daily (think health, money, travel, government and more).
Now, when a business asks me for a payment or some data from my digital wallet, which digital wallet will open first? Assuming I have proof of address, or proof of identity in several, how will wallets coordinate?
Or will that be pushed to the customer once again? More decision making and confusion for people?
2. Which brand?
Would I add my boarding pass to my bank app? Maybe. Would I add proof of salary to my airline app? Nope. Wallet branding is going to matter. And you can bet that many more wallet brands will soon appear.
That’s to be expected as the market shakes out. But remember that those wallets will need to be approved in each of their own contexts.
Will we just trust any wallet in the App Store? And how will those wallets prove they are dealing with the right person or AI agent accessing the data?
I suspect that brands will take on this trust problem. They’ll already have consumer awareness and an existing market position to step in to the digital wallet arena.
But something will then happen. Brands won’t want to add a ‘wallet experience’ to their existing customer interactions. Product teams will soon abstract the digital wallet away from the customer experience.
Taps and swipes from within the brand experience, not a separate wallet UX.
So now it’s a question of how each brand will orchestrate digital wallets. And who will customers trust to do that?
3. Is the best customer experience NO customer experience?
Today I tap to pay. Tomorrow I will 'tap to pay plus ID attribute' (e.g. >18, VIP etc.). And soon my AI agent will handle those specific transactions, and I will just say 'check me in', or 'apply for the role'.
Putting these three questions together, you might see that the 'everything wallet' will more likely be an 'everything agent'. With multiple wallets underneath (and consent to move data in and out).
As digital wallets commoditise (both the tech and in the marketplace), they will soon disappear as a distinct experience or UI in themselves.
Instead, they’ll be replaced by AI agents who will interact with our digital wallets on our behalf. And who will keep an auditable record of who (or what) asked for what personal data, and shared what information with whom.
Yes, we will still need to ‘authenticate to our devices’ to prove it's us. Probably with a face or a finger as we do today. But our AI agents and digital wallets will combine to become a new market for 'Empowerment Tech'.
So no, there won’t be an ‘everything wallet’. But there might just be an ‘everything AI Agent that handles our wallets for us’.
I Took a ‘Decision Holiday’ and Put A.I. in Charge of My Life
Excellent piece by Kashmir Hill at the NYT, on what happens when you outsource all your decisions to an AI for a week:
“Generative A.I. […] is being widely adopted by industries from medicine to business consulting as a timesaving tool. It’s popping up in widely used consumer apps, including Siri and Alexa. I conducted this admittedly ridiculous experiment to see how its spread might affect the largest work force of them all: harried parents.”
“We’ve been worried about a future where robots take our jobs or decide that humans are earth’s biggest problem and eliminate us, but an underrated risk may be that they flatten us out, erasing individuality in favor of a bland statistical average, like the paint color A.I. initially recommended for my office: taupe.”
“Each of the AI platforms had a slightly different personality. Microsoft’s Copilot was overeager. Google’s Gemini was all business. And Claude was “a prickly chatbot… that said making decisions for me was a bad idea, and cited entirely valid concerns about the limitations of A.I. and how much information and control I would be handing over.”
Interesting that it was Claude that provided some guidance around privacy.
We gain so much by outsourcing decisions (and soon actions) to our digital assistants. But at what cost, when it’s all our personal information?
Many people feel queasy about the control that BigTech has over the social media ‘newsfeed’. How will people feel when we give BigTech control over most of our recommendations, purchases and interactions?
My worry isn’t that we don’t have the right answers. My worry is that we’re missing the right questions.
See last week’s post about the Big Five Questions for AI Agents as a starter.
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:
Article: Your phone isn’t secretly listening to you for ad targeting READ
Insight: The top 100 Gen AI consumer apps (according to a16z) READ
News: ISO standardises GLEIF’s digital organisational identity READ
Article: What’s the privacy story when students hack Meta's smart glasses to look up your personal data while they look at you? READ
News: Google to use digital driver’s licenses to verify the age of website users READ
And that’s a wrap. Stay tuned for more Customer Futures soon, both here and over at LinkedIn.
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