Personhood Credentials can restore privacy, the quiet progress of age estimation, and giving Decentralised Identity a SLAP
Personhood Credentials can restore privacy, the quiet progress of age estimation, and giving Decentralised Identity a SLAP
Plus: GDPR reduces small business tech profits by 15%, the Future of Non-Human Identity, and can Twilio become a gateway for Empowerment Tech?
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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When the washing machine arrived in our homes in the 1950s, it represented the dawn of modern luxury.
But it also had a huge impact on our economy.
What used to be a time-consuming, dirty and manual part of the day became automated and simple. It freed up many hours and empowered millions of people running the home, mostly women.
Domestic appliances became part of a much longer story about the industrialisation, and automation, of tasks at home.
Sadly, we still have many time-consuming and manual tasks to deal with every day. But many of them are new. Related to our digital lives rather than scrubbing socks.
Updating our online details. Logging in. Making digital payments. Managing a blizzard of notifications. Shuffling painfully between different online accounts.
It’s counterintuitive to think about, but our digital lives and data are still very much pre-industrial.
Manual. Painful.
Where the individual does all the lifting.
But there’s good news. New digital customer tools on the side of the customer are going to automate and simplify many of our complicated, boring and unnecessary daily tasks.
And over time, these new ‘Empowerment Tech’ tools will change how we experience products and services full stop. We’ll be able to automate away the admin. And eliminate entire steps along the customer journey.
Digital interactions that used to take eight steps will only take one. Processes that used to take three weeks will take only 2 minutes.
Empowerment Tech is going to change our lives for the better. And will certainly free up time in our daily lives to focus on what matters.
Just like washing machines did over sixty years ago.
It’s all about understanding the future of being a truly digital customer. So welcome back to the Customer Futures newsletter.
In this week’s edition:
Go ahead, automate customer services with AI - because I’ll have an AI too
Giving Decentralised Identity a SLAP
Personhood Credentials can restore privacy online
The quiet progress of age estimation
Can Twilio become a gateway for Empowerment Tech?
… plus other links about the future of digital customers you don’t want to miss
Let’s Go.
Go ahead, automate customer services with AI - because I’ll have an AI too
Disruptive tech startup Bland AI has automated customer services in a remarkable new way.
Last year, they quietly created the world’s most human-sounding phone agent. It can
Be customized to any company and their use case
Handle 1,000,000+ phone calls simultaneously
Talk in any language or voice.
Neat.
And hundreds of companies are now using it at scale. It’s one of the main reasons why huge enterprises are bullish on driving efficiencies (read ‘cost-cutting’) using AI.
But what happens when I do the same on my side? What happens when I get a Personal AI to do something similar, but for me, not the business?
While Bland AI can deal with millions of customers all at once, I will soon have a Personal AI to interact with all those businesses that I have to deal with.
And this doesn’t need to be limited to customer services. Much like I can authenticate myself in a phone call with the contact centre or on the web, my Personal AI agent will be able to use my digital wallet to prove it’s me.
It can then instruct the business to do whatever I need. Like updating my account, handling a query, managing a return or complaint, or even requesting information about products or services.
(This by the way turns direct marketing upside down and inside out. One for another post).
And remember, just like Bland AI makes possible, my AI agent will soon - verifiably and with my permission - also act and sound just like me. Meaning that even when the business is not digitally enabled, my side can be.
The kicker then comes when the business can recognise it’s my approved digital agent, and then handshake with my Personal AI on the specific business process at hand (the actions, steps and data sharing needed) to complete a transaction.
“Just check me into my flight.”
“Change my address for the delivery.”
“Automate my account renewal.”
My agent will be able to share verified data about me with the business to get things done. It will all be verified, but also be perfectly auditable. So now we have a perfect record of what has been asked, what has been shared, and all transactions.
So go ahead. Automate your customer services with AI.
Because soon I’ll have a PersonalAI on my side too.
Giving Decentralised Identity a SLAP
The Velocity Network has been around for over five years. Building the ‘internet of careers’. Exploring digital wallets, verifiable credentials and decentralised ledgers to prove things about learners, HR, employers and jobs.
Their head of product, Andres Olave, just posted about what’s needed - and the missing pieces - to bring this exciting tech to market.
“From the recent discussions with leaders in the SSI and HR tech industries, I have learned that we need to do a better job of sharing these experiences to achieve our dream of using digital data for employment and education in the real-world.
“These issues are NOT about the VC format wars (W3C VC, SD-JWT-VC, MDOC), the Exchange wars (DIDCOMM, VC-API, or OID4VC), or the digital signature algorithm wars (too many to mention).
“They are about REAL business needs that must be met before any of these technologies can meet success. I call these business needs the SLAP:
Survivable credentials
Legal risk mitigation
Accreditation for Issuers and Relying Parties
Practical privacy
I love how this gets straight to the point. About the biggest challenges, not the technical weeds.
It speaks to my recent post about the biggest gaps in the digital wallet market. But he goes much deeper into legal and audit risks, governance, and how credentials will need to last.
Worth a deep dive.
VELOCITY POST, THE WALLET GAPS
Personhood Credentials can restore privacy online
For the longest time, Dave Birch has rightly argued that IS_A_PERSON will be the most important verifiable credential, most likely issued by my bank.
But when you step back, you can see that ‘proof of personhood’ could easily come from any number of places.
Many organisations can prove that I am a customer. For example, airlines have a pretty good excuse to do it. Not only have they inspected your identity documents, but they have also seen you in real life. That’s a pretty high level of assurance.
But there are other options for proof of personhood too.
Verified individuals could vouch for other people. Creating a network of real people, with an auditable breadcrumb trail of ‘who says what about whom’.
Vitalik Buterin wrote an excellent paper on this a while back. He concluded that we need either a verifiable social network (which takes time, and needs the right network conditions) or biometrics (which gets tricky with data protection teams, and introduces privacy issues).
But there’s another way through.
You guessed it, verifiable credentials and Empowerment Tech. Helping restore privacy online.
Helpfully that idea has now been written up in detail by experts from groups including a16z crypto, MIT, OpenAI, Harvard, Oxford University, Microsoft, SpruceID and the Decentralised Identity Foundation.
It’s technical, and excellent.
And it’s where I agree with Dave. IS-A-PERSON is going to be a game changer for life online.
The quiet progress of private age estimation
I’m bullish about age estimation (AE).
In an AI-driven digital world, we’re only going to need more ID data. More verification to prove we are who we say we are. And to prove we are over certain age limits.
Not everyone will have a digital wallet. Not everyone will have a mobile device and a data plan. And not everyone will have a ‘digital ID’.
Certainly not all children.
And so age estimation seems, to me at least, a sensible way to give a good enough signal that a person is in a particular age bracket. And without having to store and process lots of personal data in a way that freaks people out.
AE systems are getting better and better. No need to keep the data. And no need to know WHO it is. Just that they are over a certain age, for a certain interaction.
Accessing adult services. Buying age-protected goods.
For example, the UK’s digital ID platform Yoti does an excellent job of being public about the performance of their age estimation tech. Regularly publishing their performance against things like skin tones, age groups and gender.
Most recently they published the data from over 10M face checks - in August alone - showing that 99.5% of 6 to 12-year-olds are correctly estimated as under 13. And 99.3% of 13-17s are correctly estimated as under 21.
I’d bet that a 0.7% error rate is better than a tired checkout guy looking at a scrappy ID document. Attempting to match the image to the person in front of them while trying not to hold up the queue.
And it’s certainly better, as some propose, to holding up your passport or driving licence to the camera on your laptop. Every single time you want to prove you are old enough online.
Before you shout at me, yes, ‘over21’ verifiable credentials are coming. And yes, with a digital wallet, and digital mobile driving license, we’ll be able to do all this with fancy Empowerment Tech.
But for all those who can’t, or don’t want to, wave their clever new digital tools around, age estimation as an approach looks like a sensible way to check age without asking too much of the individual.
Which is often overlooked as the most important thing we need to get right.
Making. It. Easy.
Can Twilio become a gateway for Empowerment Tech?
Twilio has released a video of their new ‘AI Assist’ product. And it’s a pretty good view of how digital customer engagement might evolve. It’s impressive, especially if it can be rolled out across different customer touchpoints.
But remember, this is still all being developed on the business side.
Like all ‘digital transformation’, we’ve only transformed a particular organisation, and a particular set of customer touchpoints.
We overlook the point that customers have to deal with hundreds of businesses. Many of which have ‘accounts’ to manage. (The last time I checked, on average you have relationships with over 150 organisations, and that’s before you look at the household which is another 40).
But so far there’s been zero digital transformation on the customer side.
Not really.
And so Twilio’s AI Assist is very promising. but it’s still only half the picture.
Yes, it’s stitching together the customer experience, and automating a bunch of steps. But these smart AI-powered platforms can only really work when they pull together much more data from the customer side.
Not just what’s in their existing systems, or what can be pulled from their ‘trusted partners’. Instead, we need to look right across the customer experience.
But in almost all cases, the business can’t see the steps before the customer shows up, or after they’ve gone. The rest of the customer journey.
So who does?
THE CUSTOMER.
I’ll say it again. The only 360-degree view of the customer… is the customer.
So, what if the customer could share more data with the AI assistant? More context? Additional insights from other parts of the customer journey?
The restaurant booking that depends on the arrival time. Other customer loyalty and reward data, quietly sitting in all the other customer platforms. Other hotel and travel preferences, locked up in other booking systems.
The 5-minute video from Twilio’s is worth a watch. And it’s a credible market strategy, given they are already connected to many of today’s customer touchpoints (voice, web, SMS and more).
So perhaps with AI Assist, Twilio can become a gateway for Empowerment Tech? To connect the business’s AI Assistant to the customer’s own AI agent?
I’m hoping so. But it’s going to take a while, and much more customer involvement. It’s certainly going to take much more digital trust.
It’s going to take Empowerment Tech.
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:
Insight: Large language models will upend human rituals READ
News: GDPR reduces small business tech profits by 15% READ
Article: The Future of Non-Human Identity READ
Insight: What do verifiable credentials verify? READ
Article: These New AI Bots Will Do Just About Anything for You READ
And that’s a wrap. Stay tuned for more Customer Futures soon, both here and over at LinkedIn.
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