Personal Agents will become our default digital customers - but what will they do?

When AI Agents become the beating heart of digital customer engagement, what will it feel like?

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Each week I unpack the disruptive shifts around Empowerment Tech. Digital wallets, Personal AI and the future of the digital customer relationship.

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Hi folks,

With all the noise around ‘AI Agents’ right now, it’s worth slowing down and pulling apart what people actually mean when they use the term.

Because not all agents are the same. And the most important shift isn’t the one getting the most attention.

Broadly, I see three types of AI Agents emerging:

1. Workforce Agents

These are AI agents that work for employees, inside organisations. They carry out internal business tasks, with the agentic platform owned and run by the company. They are about efficiency, doing things for ‘back office’ functions like finance, operations and HR. Making internal workflows faster, cheaper, and helping the business scale.

2. Customer Agents (‘Assistants’)

These are AI agents that are run by the business, but this time doing work for customers. Think customer service bots, sales assistants, recommendation engines and guided journeys. These AI agents help customers complete tasks, but on the company’s terms, inside the company’s systems.

3. Personal Agents

This is what’s new. And what’s mostly being overlooked.

These are AI Agents that work for you, the individual. They carry out your personal admin, manage reservations, make purchases, hande the diary, and do all manner of other things that we can’t think of yet.

The point is that these AI agents will work for the person, not for the business. They’ll become new trusted services acting on behalf of (OBO) people.

Yet most of today’s market noise is focused on the first two categories. Workforce and Customer Agents. They are internal tools, enabling new efficiency gains and smarter sales processes. About delivering internal and customer interactions at a lower cost.

And it’s why there’s such a debate about job losses.

Yes, all of it matters. Deeply. But this narrower framing of AI Agents misses the bigger picture. Because the real disruption happens when customers get their own AI. When individuals themselves start using Personal Agents.

Not just for shopping discovery and reminders. But for handling larger parts of their digital life every day. So what will these agents actually do? That’s what we’re going to look at today.

It’s never been more important to understand the future of being a digital customer. So welcome back to the Customer Futures newsletter.

Let’s Go.

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One way to think about Personal Agents (let’s call them ‘PAs’) is to look at the kind of work they’ll do. I see three modes:

• Augmentation - helping us extend and improve what we can already do today

• Automation - doing things so we don’t have to

• Autonomous - doing new things, independently, and acting on our behalf

I’ve listed out some of the ways PAs will behave, why they’ll be useful, and how they will feel. It’s certainly not exhaustive, but it starts to bring them to life.

In a few short years, I believe we’ll soon feel lost without our digital PAs, our new Personal Agents.

Personal Agent ‘Augmentation’

The first thing Personal Agents will do is augment us. They will extend us. Helping us get better at things, like making decisions, staying on top of our digital lives, and becoming more efficient.

Here are some examples of how PAs will feel, and what they can do.

PAs will recommend

My PA will be personal to me and understand my preferences. It will help me make better decisions using much smarter inputs.

For example, mixing together personal insights from my own purchases (e.g. you’ll like this author), expert suggestions (e.g. published book club lists), and digital product insights (e.g. people who bought this book also bought this one).

I’ll be able to mix and match those inputs, and my PA will learn the right way to recommend things to me. If I’m buying a car, I might want more input from expert suggestions, but if I’m booking a restaurant, I might skew the input towards my own history.

While some people will want fine-tuned controls over the recommendations (a list of the cheapest vs. fastest to arrive vs. most popular), many will just want the answer. ‘Just Buy This One’.

PAs will prompt

Not only will my Personal Agent suggest products and services, but it will prompt the ‘Next Best Action’.

“I see you have a new verified address. Would you like to securely share this information with the 27 businesses who have asked for it before? You can ignore these 31 companies as you have not been interacting with them for over 2 years, or they were a one-off purchase needing delivery”.

PAs will queue

Personal Agents will handle much of the ‘inbound’ stuff you get every day. Just think about all the emails, SMS, WhatsApps and messages you get on social media. Missed calls. Calendar invites. All the accounts that need to be updated.

Much of it needs you to respond with information, or a payment or whatever.

My PA will queue up all the requests, prioritise them, prepare responses, and where needed, ask you to approve. This isn’t crazy futuristic stuff. It’s really just about giving my personal, private PA access to my information and message streams.

That’s the barrier. If we’ll trust PAs enough to unlock the gates. That’s going to take time, but it’s coming. Asking my PA to make sense of my data flows, and then only show me what’s needed and when.

PAs will sync

Personal Agents will be able to sync your data across devices and services. Right info, right time, right place. Meaning you can always access what you need, when and where you need it.

Some data can stay on your device, like your digital ID. Some things can be moved to your Personal Vault, like your music streaming history.

And some data should really live elsewhere. For example, an MRI scan. Yes, you need to manage permissions to access those kinds of files, but you don’t need to carry them around with you on your mobile.

By syncing your data across devices and contexts, your PA will also be able to handle data back-ups too.

PAs will analyse

Finding the hidden patterns - the things you are too close to see - across your digital life. And teasing out the triggers and root causes.

Your PA will be able to make sense of your data in ways you can’t. Because you’ll control the personal data inputs and rules - and likely control where and how your data is used, for example ensuring the data never leaves your device - you’ll be able to trust the insights.

The best bit? Because you trust it, you’ll likely share more data with your PA.

This is precisely what the large tech companies will struggle with. To get permission to access more and more of your personal data, to feed their AI models. Google just announced Personal Intelligence, and it’s going to be an excellent test case on what people will - and won’t - be willing to give access to.

Would you use Amazon or Microsoft for your back catalogue of payments and health transactions? Hmmm. It becomes about digital trust - and business model - fast.

There’s much more to say about ‘augmentation’ another time, but this gives you a feel for it. Helping us - not just businesses - get smarter, faster, better.

But what about getting PAs to do things?

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Personal Agent ‘Automation’

Personal Agents will also be able to complete tasks in the background, so I don’t have to.

Here are some examples.

PAs will follow my rules

Businesses have had process automation for years, using platforms like CRM. But on the customer side, it’s been woeful.

If you’re determined, you can use services like Zapier and IFTTT. But they are still clunky and limited to certain data sets.

Personal Agents will take this to the next level.

“Just check me onto my flight”. Or perhaps “Every time I buy a coffee, drop $1 into my pension”. And your PA will automatically claim compensation every time your train or flight is late.

Once people start using PAs at scale, businesses will publish simple steps for PAs to follow. How to interact with specific business processes (“We’ll ask you for A, you respond with B, and then we can send you C”). Your PA will then be able to follow those instructions, while representing your side of things, as a customer.

It’s precisely what the MCP and A2A protocols have been designed for. It’s just that right now we’re using them for Workforce and Customer Agents. The real unlock happens when Personal Agents open up the new agentic channel.

Many PA interactions will be standardised, like opening a bank account. But sometimes your PA will need to negotiate a different set of steps with the business. Like managing a complaint or handling a travel disruption. The point is that it can be automated.

These customer-side automation capabilities alone will unlock a new $bn market for the next wave of digital transformation.

PAs will minimise

When my Personal Agent does respond to a request, where possible it will also be able to minimise the data it sends back.

Why send a date of birth when it can respond with an age? And why send an age when you can send back a ‘Y’ or ‘N’ indicating ‘Over 21’.

Of course, the business side needs to be able to request - and make sense of - those minimised requests. But there’s good news there, because companies will have their own AIs doing that for them, too.

The point? We can minimise what data is shared, and therefore what is stored within businesses. Vastly reducing the business’s costs to clean, secure, insure and maintain the data. Not to mention the compliance benefits.

PAs will audit

Agents will quietly and precisely keep an auditable record of who asked for what. What was sent, to whom and when.

Right now, the agentic protocols like MCP and A2A don’t have compliance wrapped around them. They are simply data gateways to move data around.

We’ll need other agents - including my Personal Agents - to keep track of what data I’ve been asked for, what I’ve shared, and keep transaction logs for audit and compliance.

By the way, it’s worth noting that we’re about to get real-time compliance checks on my data sharing. Not ‘after the fact’ investigations. And my PA is going to become a key part of that ‘RegTech’ stack.

Importantly, these PA data records won’t become a new data lake for the advertising groups to go swimming in. Rather, they will be about building digital confidence and managing liability. And perhaps, most importantly, so that customers can ‘undo’ tasks when things go wrong (which they will).

PAs will connect

Web2 platforms helped us connect to digital services. Uber and Spotify. Facebook and Shopify. But we can’t remember what’s connected to what. Which company gets to access what, when, for how long and why.

Soon, Personal Agents will connect me securely, peer-to-peer, to the people, digital services and businesses that I want and need.

And my PA will be able to present my specific terms to the business. For example, around data portability (e.g. I want a copy of the data) and around use of the data for AI (e.g. you can’t use my data for training AI models, only for delivery of the service).

Go look up the latest announcement on ‘MyTerms’, a new data sharing standard from the IEEE, for more on that.

PAs will disconnect, too

Here’s the kicker. Those connections to those brands, marketplaces and products will last only as long as each party wishes them to. Meaning that via their PA, the customer can turn it off whenever they want.

The General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) enshrined eight rights for individuals. Digital PAs will give customers a new capability that they didn’t have before… a kind of new 9th ‘right’: The Right To Disconnect.

I don’t actually mean any kind of new legal entitlement. Just the fact that my PA can remove me from lists, cancel memberships, send Subject Access Requests on my behalf, and generally stop businesses bothering me.

Today, once a business has my email or phone number, they can contact me whenever they want. But with PAs, not only can I screen those companies out (for example with queueing, see above), but by disconnecting those companies completely. Now that’s data protection.

Good luck to the company shoving another consent screen in front of me, and then quietly tapping up my data for the next 180 days or whenever.

When you remember that we’ve spent billions of dollars digitising the business side of the market… then just wait until you see what’s possible when we digitise the customer side.

Still, this is only half the story. There’s more.

What happens when our Personal Agents can act autonomously, on our behalf (OBO)?

Personal Agents that are ‘Autonomous’

Our PAs can soon be given a task to do - a defined outcome - and they’ll go and get it done. Handing cancellations. Ordering pizza. Setting up meetings. Booking hotels. Renewing your insurance policy.

Most of the AI Majors already have semi-autonomous agentic payment features ready to go. Hooked up to the payments rails, so they can reliably - and legally - take payments via AI Agents.

Soon, your PA will be able to represent you digitally, with your profile, preferences and needs, and act on your behalf. Yes, the PA is going to need to be able to prove that it’s acting for you, with consent and so on. But more on that soon (cough digital wallets cough).

For now, I just want to point to one major ‘autonomous’ feature: broadcasting.

PAs will broadcast

I will use my PA to find the things I want online, and get what I need. It will interact, on its own, on my behalf.

My Personal Agent will ask me questions and map my preferences. It might first recommend things I should consider (see the section on ‘Augmentation’ above). And then we’ll agree on the spec of what I need, the price/ size/ delivery/ brand etc.

It will also define a ‘minimum profile’ needed to engage businesses and brands. (Remember, the business doesn’t need to know who you are, just that you’re a verified buyer).

Armed with all the right info, my digital PA will then be able to ‘broadcast’ my needs to the market.

Sound odd? Well, businesses already do this today. They send out ‘RFPs’ (Requests For Proposals) all the time, for other companies to respond with information and offers.

And so our PAs will soon handle ‘Personal RFPs’ on our behalf. Doc Searls wrote about this idea in ‘The Intention Economy’ back in 2015. Please go and read it. It’s an idea whose time has come.

My ‘buying signals’ will reach brands in three ways:

1. Via other AI agents. The platforms whose only job is to connect people (demand) to brands (supply). These will be new intermediary connection bots that are dedicated to helping businesses find customers.

2. Via trusted marketplaces. My PA will be connected to specific dynamic marketplaces that can find what I need. A bit like today’s high-frequency trading platforms that moderate ads, but instead they will trade and manage anonymous needs and corresponding offers. Today’s existing online marketplaces will evolve to accept - and respond to - your digital Personal Agent.

3. Via direct connections to companies. Once you understand the power of private, personal digital connections, you’ll see that my Personal Agent will already be linked, privately and securely, to the businesses I already deal with. So my PA will be able to pump my needs directly into the company’s existing marketing machines and CRM tools. Those brands will be able to respond directly to me with an offer. PA-to-CRM integrations are already being built in the market.

A mini side note. Look at that last point above. Businesses will respond with an ‘offer’.

With these three models in place above, powered by our digital PAs, digital advertising is about to be turned on its head.

Today, businesses spray ads out, hoping for ‘relevance’ and ‘engagement’. But it’s all guesswork. And is why the response rate to digital ads is less than 2%.

But here’s the thing. Digital ads won’t be ads anymore. They’ll be offers.

Sent directly to my Personal Agent, in response to a verified request from me. And depending on the context, my PA will either respond directly (see Automation), or present me with a summary of the options, with a recommendation (see Augmentation).

There’s so much more to be written about autonomous Personal Agents. But for now, just understand that AI autonomy is going to completely change how we spend time online. How we interact.

And that it will completely disrupt customer engagement as we know it.

Personal Agents will empower

Whatever we call them, these new digital tools will augment, automate and act autonomously. And there will be a whole new category of services acting from the customer side.

They will empower us. Perhaps for the first time, we’ll finally be able to participate fully in the digital economy.

Independently. Privately. Securely.

Traditionally, a ‘PA’ - literally a ‘Personal Assistant’ - would take notes, help you manage your diary, and keep you organised. Someone to deal with things around you so that you can focus on the main job.

Within the next 5 years, your new digital PA, your Personal Agent, is going to run whole parts of your digital life. Especially the daily ‘brandmin’ crap, like keeping things up to date, renewals and dealing with customer services. (Soon to be renamed the ‘PA Channel’ or whatever).

And the implications are going to be staggering.

Of course, our PAs are going to need to know lots about us. More than we know about ourselves. And will increasingly act on our behalf. So we’ll need to keep a close eye on how they work. Who runs them. And with what business model.

I’ll say it again: The issue with AI won’t be digital privacy. It’s going to be digital intimacy.

So much more needs to be in place before PAs can get adopted at scale, including

• PA identity - agents will need their own persistent identifiers

• PA reputation - we will need to observe these agent behaviours - and outcomes - over time

• PA governance and regulations - getting clear on what these agents are allowed to do on behalf of people, or not, especially when it comes to regulated sectors like health and finance

• PA access to customer context and data - what access we give these agents to our data, where, and what consent looks like

• PA experience - what does delegating tasks look and feel like? Will we trust it? How often, and how will they check back in, with ‘owner in the loop’?

• PA business models - how will these agents make money? Outcome-based? Transaction-based? Kick-backs from brands?

It’s all to be worked through. Much of it quite gnarly.

But overall, I’m excited. Because Personal Agents will become the beating heart of customer digital empowerment.

And perhaps most importantly, our digital PAs will become the very definition of what it means to be a digital customer.

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And that’s a wrap. Stay tuned for more Customer Futures soon, both here and over at LinkedIn.

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