Getting your (ID) message right is WAY more important than your (ID) tech
Plus: Your biggest AI challenge isn’t the model - it’s getting personal data into it
Hi everyone, thanks for coming back to Customer Futures.
Each week I unpack the disruptive shifts around Empowerment Tech. AI Agents, digital wallets, Personal AI in and the future of the digital customer relationship.
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Hi folks,
Gam Dias’ recent piece for the Trusted Agents newsletter was about goats.
Why?
Because he wanted to make a point about customer loyalty.
The goat in the picture above doesn’t stay because it loves you. It stays because you tied it to the post.
“You have a CRM and you call it a relationship. A points scheme you call loyalty. Retargeting you call a bond. But none of it was loyalty. It was just a rope. You see, comparison took effort, switching was a hassle, and your customer could not be bothered.
“You read all that friction as devotion.”
Bang on, as ever.
But there is something else afoot.
I bet you didn’t notice something pretty important last week. We crossed an important milestone for the digital economy.
According to the Cloudflare CEO Matthew Prince, automated traffic now accounts for about 57% of HTTP requests. While human-generated traffic has fallen to 43%.
This is the first time machine traffic has consistently exceeded human traffic on the web.
Most of it was bog standard AI crawlers of course, not an explosive wave of AI agents shopping on behalf of people.
But.
You need to think carefully about what it points at.
Because the day your customer hands the comparing task, the switching task, to an agent, the rope is cut.
A Personal Agent will check every price, every review, every return policy, and it does not care that someone has banked with you for eleven years.
Nor will the AI watch the superbowl ad, or be nudged into an emotional purchase by the picture of grandpa or the kids.
As Gam reminds us, loyalty is not a thing you store any more.
It’s a new digital vote that’s cast by a very patient piece of software, making better decisions than the customer can, 24/7, faster, with more data, and sweeping across most of your competitors before your marketing team gets out of bed.
Goats eh?
One to think about as you design your latest digital transformation to ‘own the customer’.
It’s never been more important to understand the future of the digital customer.
So welcome back to the Customer Futures newsletter.
In this week’s edition:
Getting your (ID) message right is WAY more important than your (ID) tech
What if an organisation holds too much trust?
Your biggest AI challenge isn’t the model - it’s getting personal data into it
… and much more
Let’s Go.
Getting your (ID) message right is WAY more important than your (ID) tech
If you want a textbook example of how NOT to explain and promote digital ID, look no further than the UK government.
Which is ironic, because only six months ago, it was on the path to launching a digital identity wallet that can hold a range of useful citizen credentials. And was framed about digital growth, citizen empowerment and data portability.
And yet.
Only months later, it was an omni-shambles of a comms screw up.
So bad, that a government body had to look into what went wrong, and what to do about it.
Ladies and gentlemen of they jury, I give you: the UK Government Home Affairs Committee’s latest report into the recently announced launch of digital ID...
“The government’s early attempts to set out its plans for digital ID were nothing short of a fiasco. To the public this announcement came out of the blue and made little sense.
“It raised fears of government over-reach into people’s lives and was so poorly thought out that they had few answers to ease these concerns.
“It is worth bearing in mind that this was a policy direction that was generally well received by the public before they were spooked by the government’s poorly thought out and badly explained plans.
“Ministers have rightly gone back to the drawing board and begun the difficult task of rebuilding trust in what has the potential to be a valuable tool for government.
“Alongside potential benefits remains the potential for significant changes in the way people access services or interact with the state. That is why government must include voices from across society in deciding the direction of digital ID.
“Each element of its future digital ID strategy must have clearly defined aims, a comprehensive plan for delivery and strong safeguards. Any future mistakes might prove fatal for public confidence.”
The fact that the UK Government’s plans include digital wallets, verifiable credentials and an open standards-based portable digital identity is lost in the noise.
I first pitched the UK government about this approach six years ago.
They’ve finally got the tech approach right. Maybe in another six years they will have worked out how to communicate it.
Bonus read: the excellent Richard Pope’s view on why they got it wrong, and the 7 messages that would have worked.
UK GOV COMMITTEE REPORT, RICHARD’S PROPOSAL
What if an organisation holds too much trust?
Great question this week from Sarah Gold. Recommended reading on ‘Just Enough Trust.’
“Organisations generally want to gain people’s trust, and maximise this to the greatest extent possible, but what we’ve found during our decade working on this issue is that this is the wrong goal.
“A system people trust completely and without question is as dangerous as one they don’t trust at all.”
Your biggest AI challenge isn’t the model - it’s getting personal data into it it
Much of the emerging Empowerment Tech stack requires the movement - the transfer - of personal data.
Because
Personal AI needs personal context
Digital wallets need credentials
Personal data stores need data sources and imports
Agentic commerce needs permissioned access to user data
It’s becoming obvious that the biggest barrier to the AI economy won’t be the AI itself.
Because there are now plenty of good-enough (by which I mean mind-blowingly clever) AI models, many of which are open source, low cost, and even on-device.
No, the challenge will be getting the data into them in the first place.
So if you’re not already following the work of the Data Transfer Initiative (DTI), you should be.
Did you know that over 70 jurisdictions now give individuals a legal right to data portability? And over 140 have data protection laws covering it?
Personal Data Portability is becoming a global expectation, not just a European exception.
The DTI is a world-leading organisation with experts on all things data portability, not only shaping and helping deliver the regulations that mandate customer data transfers, but building the critical frameworks and infrastructure to make it possible.
Inevitable, even.
And the DTI has become increasingly vocal about AI because personal data portability is likely to become one of the most important pieces in the AI economy.
The very definition of Portable Customer Context that AI needs to thrive.
You can already feel it coming.
Your AI digital assistant gets super-powered when you can:
Move your Gmail history into a portable customer memory layer for applications and services to access, not just Google
Move your purchase history from Amazon into another marketplace service
Move your travel data into a trusted journey management and expenses app
Move your ‘social graph’ (i.e. who you know, how often you communicate and all that metadata about your social life) into a new, less spammy private network
Without data portability, the incumbents - meaning the BigTech players, the data brokers and all those data intermediaries - keep their data moats, their data advantage.
But with new, real-time and meaningful data portability - much of which is now mandated in law around the world - new entrants can compete. And exciting new digital services can emerge.
It’s why the DTI’s work to coordinate and ship open-source infrastructure for data portability is so important.
Powering the likes of Google’s Data Portability API, Facebook’s Transfer your Information, and Apple’s Data and Privacy page.
Yet while most people see the DTI as a data portability initiative, I think they’re building something much bigger. Because they are starting to solve a governance problem that the agentic AI world doesn’t yet realise it has.
Right now, agents are sprouting like weeds. And every week there’s a new model, a new framework, a new startup, a new gateway, and a new agent marketplace. And naturally, much of the conversation has focused on identity. How does an agent identify itself? Who is it acting for? How do I know it’s really my agent?
Yes, these are important questions. But hidden underneath every identity question is really a trust question.
Because an agent can identify itself perfectly and still be dangerous. An agent can authenticate flawlessly and still misuse data. An agent can prove who it is while remaining entirely untrustworthy.
As the number of agents explodes, trust will become even more important than identity. Trust is what allows data and AI ecosystems to scale.
In today’s era of rapid tech shifts, organisations will naturally rise and fall. Models will come and go. Standards will evolve. And startups will appear overnight and disappear just as quickly.
But what becomes most valuable are the stable principles of trust that will soon sit over and above any specific company, model or platform.
Which is precisely where DTI becomes interesting.
The new ‘DTI Registry’ is designed to vet services and organisations that want access to personal data. It acts as an independent governance layer between users, data holders and data recipients.
Today, that means data portability. Tomorrow it could mean something much broader. When the same question will be asked everywhere:
“Can this organisation be trusted with my data?”
Or increasingly:
“Can this agent be trusted to act on my behalf?”
The AI industry is currently discovering identity. Soon it will rediscover trust. And trust is much harder.
We’ve already seen how casually people hand over permissions to AI tools they’ve downloaded from the internet. Email access. Calendars. Documents. Financial information. Personal files.
Of course, convenience is winning. Plus ça change. But governance is still struggling to keep up.
So the question isn’t whether agents will gain access to our data. They will. Rather, the question is what trust infrastructure sits underneath them when they do.
This week, the DTI just hit another milestone. A new trust mark.
Agnostic of a provider’s business model, available globally, and where every badge holder has been verified against the DTI trust framework.
It’s why organisations like the DTI matter. Because they’re quietly building a new layer of trust that the agent economy is going to need.
And fast.
Remember, the biggest AI challenge won’t be the model - it’s getting your personal data into it.
Bonus read: the DTI’s CEO, Chris Riley, posted this last week about the mission: “Building Trust Infrastructure for Agentic AI”
A longer list of things to track…
There are SO many interesting and important Customer Futures things happening at the moment. Here are just a few from my open tabs:
Announcement: Model Context Protocol now has enterprise-managed authentication (‘Zero Touch Auth’) READ
Post: Your AI agent has an identity… that doesn’t mean it has permission READ
Announcement: Google Wallet ID passes are coming to Europe READ
Opinion: Your next customer is a machine READ
News: Singapore releases a 53 page guide to Agentic AI Governance READ
Article: (The World Bank) Digital Wallets: A New Paradigm - Convergence of User-Centric Digital Identity, Data Sharing and Payments READ
Post: Signal’s Meredith Whittaker says AI chatbots ‘are not your friends’ and calls Copilot agents a backdoor READ
Announcement: Advancing trusted calls with Open Verifiable Calling at Microsoft READ
Article: How GenAI agents threaten retail banks’ customer relationships READ
Opinion: Governments across Europe still think they’re just shipping a digital wallet by the end of 2026… but they aren’t READ
Opinion: Did OpenAI Just Kill Its Ads Business? READ
And that’s a wrap. Stay tuned for more Customer Futures soon, both here and over at LinkedIn.
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