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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,
Some brilliant stuff from Ben Affleck made the rounds last week on ‘AI taste’.
“Craft is knowing how to work. Art is knowing when to stop.”
He was asked about the AI disruption coming in filmmaking. He was pretty brutal about the shift, and the changes to jobs.
But not about art. And knowing ‘when to stop’.
My own work is being transformed. What used to take me 4 weeks, I can now do in 4 hours. Yes, the ‘task’ is changing. But my ‘work’ isn’t.
I often describe what I do as ‘helping turn on the lights’. Helping execs and teams see things they can’t today about the future of the digital customer relationship. And giving businesses a new framing for what is about to happen to digital and personal data, and how they can prepare.
Yes, I write about privacy, data, digital trust, and personal agency.
But my real work is helping people navigate what’s coming, and set teams on a new path. Hopefully towards the empowerment of people, passengers, patients, customers, parents and all the rest.
It’s weird though. So many people use AI to write their posts. To automate that task.
But writing is the work. It’s not just a task to be farmed out. As David Hieatt says, “you can’t outsource your pushups.”
As I’ve said before. Writing is easy. But ‘thinking’ is hard. And I’m here for the hard work. Not the automation of the tasks.
Craft is knowing how to work - and AI can write all day long. But as Affleck says, art - and from my point of view, helping turn on the lights for teams - is knowing when to stop. And creating a story to move people.
So maybe I’m actually in the ‘moving people’ business. And that’s not about writing more words.
So yes, AI is coming for your task. Not your job. But wow, jobs are going to change. And personal AI agents are going to be so, so central to that. I just don’t think people are ready for what’s coming.
Mad times.
So let’s jump in. In this week’s edition:
Do you really want to build your digital private life in a 1994 chat room?
Watermarks watermarks everywhere, but not a drop to drink
The AI stormy weather - and the digital hurricanes - are coming
… and much more
Let’s Go.
Do you really want to build your private digital life in a 1994 chat room?
First up, we need to agree that email is objectively awful to use. We end up Googling ourselves to find stuff:
“Receipt, car, has attachment, garage, repair.”
Second, your inbox is basically your to-do list organised by everyone else. It’s mad that we use it to manage our lives.
Third, it’s so bad, that young people increasingly see it as “the thing I’m forced to use by my boss.”. It’s no longer a place to communicate.
Especially with all the performative it-used-to-be-a-handwritten-letter nonsense.
“Dear X, blah, blah… kind regards…”
No, our chats have moved elsewhere, and email has become a utility. Oddly, and unexpectedly, it’s become the place we dump our documents, receipts, tickets and files.
Look again. Where do you actually keep your bookings, confirmation notes, tickets? Your calendar reminders? Your account renewal documents?
Me too.
Because the businesses we deal with can’t access our personal Dropbox or Google Drive, they send everything to our emails instead. And over the last 30 years, we’ve accidentally created an enormous, messy repository of our digital lives.
(Sidebar: there’s another round of uproar at the moment about Google reading our emails by default. Really? I’m shocked that there’s gambling going on in this casino! (Go ask Claude if you don’t get the reference. It’s a diamond of a film). You didn’t think that it was always happening quietly on that server in California? Didn’t you pay attention the first time, with all the BigTech privacy backlash? After Ed Snowden pulled the curtain back on PRISM and the NSA? For those who care about this stuff, check out the US Cloud Act. The geopolitics here are messy, fascinating and alarming in equal measure.)
Anyway, back to email as a file system, and what’s coming. Because AI agents are going to be a much better tool for the ‘help me handle all my digital stuff’ we have to deal with.
Soon, we won’t really care where the data is. We’ll just care that it’s safe, our agent can access it, understand it, and combine the right information at the right time.
There are some mind-blowing examples already showing up.
Here’s a good one about the latest Silicon Valley darling - Instinct - shared just this week:
“I have a chief of staff that reads my email, then a travel agent that actually runs the trip.
“Flight confirmation hits Gmail. Chief of staff pulls the confirmation code, connection, TSA PreCheck, carry-on only (it knows me), and drops it in a Travel Agency group chat with the job: night-before lounge brief, weather/traffic/FAA a few hours out, landing ping when I touch down to let me know where taxi or uber line is.
“It also builds the itinerary. Travel Agent hits the X API for what’s actually happening in that city that week, then turns it into a plan so I’m not googling “things to do” from a hotel bed.
“I landed at LGA at midnight in the rain. It already knew terminal, gate, skip bag claim, time to get home and that yellow taxi beat Uber because the stand is curbside and Uber was a garage walk in a surge.”
The explosion of possibilities hasn’t even started yet.
BUT… the invisible handbrake is still on. It’s our good old friend: digital trust.
You think email is trusted? Go ask your bank if they’re happy to send important information there. Nope. Instead they’ll send you an email telling you to check your inbox AT THE BANK. To log in over there.
That tells you everything.
We’re currently in the 1994 ‘online chat room’ stage of AI agents.
Yes, it’s all exciting, and all becoming possible at an explosive rate, but very little of it is genuinely trusted. Most of the people playing with this stuff are either technical or deeply into what’s coming next. 1994 chat rooms.
But this time it’s moving at warp speed. The consumer wave is about to break. At that point, I reckon ChatGPT becomes AOL. Maybe Yahoo.
We’re only using email because right now it’s the easiest place for an agent to find all the fragments of our digital lives.
But remember: email is neither particularly secure, nor particularly easy to use.
So now imagine agents crawling all over it. Fake stuff. Fake trips. Fake receipts. Fake people. Fake agents.
AI-enabled fraud is already a massive problem. And you think email is a great place to build the central brain containing my tickets, bookings, receipts and identity?
Folks, email is a stopgap. It works for now. But we’re building on sand.
Yes, some of the latest AI Agent rocketship startups will sizzle. Shooting stars. Amazing demos. Huge adoption.
But eventually we’re going to discover what breaks first.
Which is digital trust. And likely email as the file system.
Which means the next layer isn’t just better AI. It’s the hard stuff: around identity - asking which AI is this? Verifiable people and verifiable organisations - asking who approved this? Verifiable receipts and verifiable permissions - asking what can this AI do and how do we know?
Ultimately, it’s becoming fast about verifiable agents.
Because if good agents can crawl through your email and act on what they find, bad agents can too.
Yes, AI agents are fantastic.
But email is certainly not. And not as a universal file system for your life.
Do you really want to build your digital private life with the security model of a 1994 chat room?
Watermarks watermarks everywhere, but not a drop to drink
This came in last week:
“Fable 5.1 also includes an imperceptible watermark, which the EU AI Act now requires of all AI providers serving the EU market.
“Output quality is unchanged, and the watermark contains no information about your organization or any user.“
Well. It turns out that digital trust is a thing. Who knew?
But I have a question. ‘Zero information about your organisation’… does that mean it can’t be correlated over time?
Anthropic says that the watermark is “a numerical way of determining the likelihood that Claude was involved in writing a piece of text”. In other words, each piece of AI text can be shown to have Claude’s fingerprints on it, but without revealing which Claude account.
But I’m asking something different: can it accidentally reveal that it’s the same source each time…?
It’s great that Anthropic’s approach doesn’t have any obvious identifiers about who produced the content. But presumably it contains common patterns or identifiers that can be mapped over time, correlating the place it came from?
Why does this matter?
Because right now, we need to know if things have been created by AI or not. And therefore who owns (or has copied) the content. Including checking who really wrote the document (I’m looking at you Deloitte and PwC… it’s worth 5 mins gawping at each of their very public blunders with AI-written reports).
But let’s go one step further.
Our AI tools are already being used to understand our ‘intent’. Capturing, understanding and broadcasting what we need right now. And creating a memory of all the things we ask about.
Meaning that all our AI inputs - as invisible as they are - will have traces of us within them. Just like your IP addtrsss gives away your location without you really thinking about it.
We should assume there will be AI digital fingerprints all over the place. Which - guess what - Fable and Mythos and Grok can pick up and correlate those signals in ways humans can’t. And do it at speeds that we can’t imagine.
Accidentally correlating who is who, and what has been asked for, is one of those unintended consequences that looks tiny right now. But will have huge implications over time.
Especially as we spill our private lives into these marvellous new AI agent creatures that are now crawling all over our digital lives and getting stuff done on our behalf.
The toothpaste is out the tube folks.
The AI stormy weather - and the digital hurricanes - are coming
This week we heard about the early Facebook user who signed up in 2006 (when you had to use a .edu email) but just got locked out of her account. Permanently.
She just lost 20 years of her digital life.
It begs a deeply important question: Who gets to permanently lock you out of a social account, when your profile is the key to:
Your social life
Your personal data history
Your connections to others (who you know, how you are connected, how often you connect etc.)
This is not a rant about sovereignty. And it’s not about control. It’s about having options. About choice.
Yes, you can download all your FB data. But notice that you can’t take your social graph. ie your connections, your relationships.
That’s actually the most important part. Who knows who and why.
Her account was at first frozen, then cancelled by FB, because of someone else messing about with a related other account over at Instagram. But using the same login and handle.
Imagine joining Facebook in 2006, building up 20 years of a digital life, then in 2026 getting your front door keys taken away because someone showed up at your house pretending to be you.
Why do we have to keep repeating the same lesson over and over again? Do we really want the ‘risk and safety bot’ in charge of 20 years of our digital lives?
Next up: your actual life is about to sit inside your Personal AI. Bookings, preferences, connections, therapy notes, work productivity, maybe even payments.
But then oops: “I’m sorry, we just locked you out because we saw some suspicious activity on your account.”
Oops indeed.
We won’t make the same mistake again, as we did with social media.
Right. RIGHT?
Put this point together with the first newsletter article above about email, and you can see that we need a rethink - a reboot - of how our digital lives are set up. What is stored where, who has access, what’s secure (or not) and how so can crawl over all of it.
I’ve been writing and talking about all of this since 2009. And it’s finally here.
But like climate change, it’s mostly invisible at first. No one carded about Meta locking you out in 2009.
But the impacts are real, and they are coming soon.
Gradually then suddenly.
A few people being locked out of social media here and there is like a small hurricane happening somewhere far away because of the warming weather. Far away enough that we don’t notice. Climate change we didn’t notice.
Until we did.
The world is heating up folks - and we are building out the digital economy on a few, fragile single points of failure that can shut you out without notice, and for no reason.
The AI stormy weather - and the digital hurricanes - are coming. And hurricanes don’t care if your building has good foundations and a sturdy roof or not.
I don’t know about you, but I’m getting a new house.
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:
Post: AI, tools and transformation (a must read from Ben Evans) READ
Announcement: Live airline seats and booking in iMessage READ
Post: An ID for every agent, or a mandate for every action? READ
Analysis: A map of EU Digital Identity Wallet readiness for every EU member state (and other related countries too) READ
Idea: Apple promotes a Global Trust Registry to recognise and verify trusted identities READ
News: EMVCo publishes another Agentic Payments Framework - but with a neutral, interoperable layer for ‘managing consumer intent’ READ
Announcement: Claude’s new Shopping Agent ‘that lives inside your app or website’ (a big deal) READ
And that’s a wrap. Stay tuned for more Customer Futures soon, both here and over at LinkedIn.
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