From digital wallets and data stores, to sovereign agents and personal AI... what does Empowerment Tech really mean?

It's time to unpack 'ET'.. as a trio of Digital Wallets, Data Stores and Personal Agents

Hi everyone,

Thanks for coming back to Customer Futures. Each week I unpack the fundamental shifts around Empowerment Tech. Digital wallets, Personal AI and new digital customer relationships.

This is the PERSPECTIVE edition, a regular take on the future of digital customer relationships.

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For a long time, I’ve written about the disruptive potential of digital wallets. How they are part of a family of new technologies that start on the side of the customer.

I’ve called it ‘Empowerment Tech’, or ET.

But what does ET really mean?

Digital wallets are only one part of the story. I actually see three core pillars of ET. A trio of tech that comes together to do things with and for individuals:

1. Digital Wallets

2. Personal Data Vaults (or stores, or pods, or lockers, or web nodes…)

3. Personal Agents

This is a short post to look at each, why and how they matter. How they are related. And what’s coming.

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1. Digital wallets

Digital wallets are marvellous things.

Most people first think of the Apple and Google Wallets. And they point to an elegant UI with QR codes, payments and loyalty. Maybe even cryptocurrencies.

But digital wallets are really just trusted stores of verifiable data. They can run on any trusted device, like your mobile or laptop, or even in the cloud.

A private and secure environment that can cryptographically ‘watermark’ the data it holds.

Ensuring that only the approved person can operate the wallet for important transactions.

These digital wallet ‘watermarks’ matter. They mean that when data is shared, other people and businesses can instantly verify it.

But what started as a way to control payments, can now handle any kind of data, including your digital ID.

Today my digital wallet can store a driver’s license, a boarding pass or a loyalty card. But soon it will also hold your employee badge and proof of insurance. Or a loan statement and a login credential.

With this broader view of wallet data, you can see how valuable digital wallets will become. Enabling trusted data portability in ways that have never been possible before.

Digital Wallets mean we can prove, instantly:

1. Where a piece of data comes from

2. Who it was given to

3. If it’s been tampered with

4. It’s been revoked

And, using clever maths and cryptography, we can share FACTS about the data, rather than the DATA ITSELF:

• Are you a verified VIP (yes or no) - without sharing complex account history

• Are you over 21 (yes or no) - without sharing age or DoB

• Are you a resident of this country (yes or no) - without sharing address

• Are you entitled to get an employee discount at the hotel (yes or no) - without sharing which company, role or personal HR info

Look around and you’ll see loads of brands and governments jumping on digital wallets as way to enable new citizen and customer experiences.

And so they are marvellous little creatures.

Helping others trust my data.

2. Personal Data Vaults (or stores, or pods or lockers or web nodes…)

Personal Data Vaults are also marvellous.

Some describe them as ‘decentralised web nodes’ (DWNs), others as ‘personal data stores’ (PDSs) or ‘data pods’ (that’s Tim Berners-Lee’s choice).

They are special because they are places where people can collect and store their personal information. A digital shoebox, pulling in data streams from all over your life. Data from receipts and travel. From health and entertainment. From money and wellness. From volunteering and coaching. From payments and mortgages.

You get the idea.

A good example is listening to music. My music streaming is currently fragmented across a range of places. Apple. Amazon. Spotify. Youtube. Tiktok. And many more.

Wouldn’t it be great to see across those streams, make sense of them, and offer smart recommendations? Or to have my data streams ready and waiting in the hotel room when I arrive?

But it’s also true for my shopping history. All my receipts. All my warranties. All my payments and online transactions. Wouldn’t it be helpful to have that organised, available for me to get what I need, when I need it?

Our email providers already have much of that of course. But they don’t have context. And they can’t see the stuff that’s NOT in my email. Like a credit card statement.

(Side note. You can see the competitive value here when folks like Amazon, knowing that Google Mail is building a data-rich view of me via email, start stripping back the amount of customer data in their email receipts).

Anyway, a Personal Data Vault can bring these feeds together. Helping individuals make much better sense of their digital lives. More coherently. More intelligently. More privately.

Because your data is under your control, and sharable with your permission.

Now, does anyone really want to ‘manage’ their data? Of course not. But would I like smarter recommendations, discounts based on my interests and more personalised experiences?

You bet.

Data stores are different to digital wallets. Because they don’t need to watermark (digitally sign) every blob of data. And that’s a Good Thing.

Just think about the vast streams of data in those personal data feeds. And the costs, expense and delay of watermarking everything using a digital wallet. Instead, Personal Data Vaults put the individual at the centre of her digital life. So we can see and make sense of things, and surface the right information at the right time.

So they are marvellous little creatures too.

Helping me manage my data.

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3. Personal Agents

Personal Agents are perhaps my favourite part of the Empowerment Tech Stack.

If Digital Wallets and Personal Data Vaults are places, then Personal Agents are actions.

My agents do the doing. They are a digital brain that can learn and act. They can work proactively (seeing a pattern and taking action for me) or reactively (responding to a request).

Personal Agents can store rules (policies), can intercept data requests (responding on my behalf, with those rules), and can keep track of all the data ins and outs of my life.

Who needs what. Auditing what I’ve shared with whom. Minimising the data I end up sharing (“you don’t need all that data thank you very much… just this”).

Folks have been working on variations of Personal Agents for decades, with mixed results. But they came to life in 2016 with a specific purpose. As part of the Self Sovereign Identity (SSI) movement.

In SSI, Digital Wallets store and sign the data, and SSI Agents move the data.

Now with the AI explosion upon us, these agents are having a re-birth. Bill Gates and Sam Altman call them ‘AI Agents’. And I’ve called them ‘Personal AI’ platforms.

In the Empowerment Tech stack, I’m calling them Personal Agents.

Whatever they are called, they are going to become our personal digital brains.

And they will be marvellous little creatures too.

Helping me get things done.

Who runs Personal Agents?

I’m going to dive into Personal Agents, and what they can do, in a coming post soon. But for now, I want to look more closely at a nearly invisible, but critically important part of the story.

On their own, Digital Wallets and Data Vaults are static. They don’t ‘do’ anything. Rather, it’s my Personal Agent that’s going to create value for me and those I interact with.

And so who trains and runs these Personal Agents - and with what incentives - will make all the difference between digital empowerment and digital dis-empowerment.

Ask yourself this: which AI platform really works on your behalf? Will people be able to spot which is working for you vs. one that is operated by an organisation that may, or may not, be aligned with your needs and values?

To see what’s coming, I’m pointing to Jamie Burke. He’s the founder and CEO of web3 incubator Outlier Ventures. Last summer he wrote about Personal Agents - calling them 'Sovereign Agents’. Here are some snippets (bold mine):

“Very quickly AI will bifurcate into Platform Agents and Sovereign Agents. Both will co-exist and also have to contend with a swarm of Malicious Agents.

“Why having an AI Agent you can provably trust to serve you, and only you, will become increasingly obvious. And so will the need for Web3 become obvious to anyone trying to realise agent-based systems at scale.

“To deliver anything close to AGI at scale, the only way that can happen is through decentralised marketplaces of specialised 3rd party agents.

“You will give your Sovereign Agent LLM a task, which it will subcontract out to a decentralised network of highly specialised agents (inc platform agents) who will compete for the job / parts of it on a set of parameters (your preferences).

“The experience will feel like your Sovereign Agent has AGI. But the intelligence is in the network, not owned or controlled by anyone platform (although many will have outsized roles in it).

“The simplest way to think about it: some agents you’ll want to know everything about you; and some agents you’ll want to have selective disclosures with, so they can perform very specific tasks.

Big Tech will try and convince you their agents are actually Sovereign Agents. Helping you manage 3rd party agents.”

I love the idea of splitting out AI this way. Sovereign Agents working for you. Platform Agents as a network of AI platforms interacting to get things done. Malicious Agents acting against you.

It’s clear though that whoever creates the value for the individual will win. Why? Because the value of an AI isn’t the smarts. It isn’t the power of the LLM.

It’s the data. Therefore it’s about the incentives, and who operates the Personal Agent.

How will we know which Personal Agent/Sovereign AI is which, and who operates what?

You guessed it - Digital Wallets.

And how will we know that the AI Agent has been trained on the right data from the right sources?

You guessed it - Personal Data Vaults.

A triplet of Empowerment

So there you have it. This trio of ET capabilities will work together as a set. And will start and end on the customer side:

1. Digital Wallets - THE WHAT

2. Personal Data Vaults - THE WHERE

3. Personal Agents - THE WHY

In a coming post, I’ll dig into what Digital Agents can do. And why it matters.

I’d love to get your feedback on this way of thinking about ET. And how it forms the Empowerment Tech Stack.

For now, remember that it matters who’s running what. And that there’s a difference between Personal and Personalised.

Especially when it comes to AI and customer empowerment.

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