The Customer Futures 2024 wrap up
Your top posts from the last 12 months, and the December updates you don’t want to miss
Hi everyone, thanks for coming back to Customer Futures.
Each week I unpack the ever-increasing and disruptive shifts around AI Agents, digital wallets, identity and digital customer relationships.
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To the regular subscribers, thank you.
This week’s newsletter is a massive thank you, and a wrap up of 2024.
First of all, thank you to everyone who’s been in touch over the last 12 months. Your insights, ideas and introductions have been invaluable.
Second, a huge thank you to everyone who has signed up to the newsletter this year. These weekly posts wouldn’t have been possible without you. Over 50% of you open every week, which still amazes me.
And finally, thanks to those of you who made it to one of the Customer Futures meetups in 2024. From London to Copenhagen. From Berlin to San Francisco. It’s been amazing to catch up over a few beers, and to share this mad journey around AI Agents, Digital Wallets and Empowerment Tech.
Across www.customerfutures.com and LinkedIn, there are now well over 3000 people interested in the future of being a digital customer. That blows my mind, but also just shows how far digital wallets, digital ID, Personal AI and data stores have come over the last few years.
So, a huge Thank You. And a big welcome back to the final Customer Futures newsletter of the year.
In this week’s edition:
Your top posts from 2024
The EU Digital Identity Wallet lands in Italy despite privacy concerns
Document scanning is dead
The UK's e-signature laws are still in the Dark Ages
Google announces Mariner, a Personal AI Agent
AI Agents will require accountability…. and accountability will require identity
The Decentralised Identity Stalemate
We're thinking about identity verification and AI agents in reverse
Grab that cinnamon latte and a comfy seat, and Let’s Go.
Your top posts of 2024
Here are some of the Customer Futures posts that caught your attention this year. The most reads, comments and feedback:
eIDAS2 is a €Bn opportunity staring us in the face - but most people can't see it READ
‘A-Commerce’ will be the biggest disruption since the web READ
Why is nobody asking these Big Five Questions about ‘Agent AI’? READ
Apple is playing the long game on digital trust READ
What do the world's largest organisations think about decentralised identity? READ
Amazon is ‘doubling down’ on digital ID credentials READ
Death to the super-app… long live the ‘ultra-app’ READ
From digital wallets and data stores, to sovereign agents and personal AI... what does Empowerment Tech really mean? READ
The EU Digital Identity Wallet lands in Italy despite privacy concerns
Italy is the first to launch their government EUDI Wallet. Even though there are still some pretty big open questions about privacy.
Document scanning is dead
Most ID companies think they are building products. But they are really building features.
You can see this playing out with all the M&A across the ID market. This week’s edition: IDVerse just announced that it is being acquired by LexisNexis.
Dave Birch predicts credit cards will disappear well before cash does. He’s right of course, because each payment type is not just about the transaction. It’s about many other things like convenience, privacy, trust and user experience.
And so it will be true of ID documents.
Following the IDVerse news, Steve Craig thinks that if you game this out, you could predict that document scanning (a feature not a product) is dead.
I mostly agree. But think it will be for most people in most countries. Not for everything, or everyone, everywhere.
Document scanning will take a looooong time to displace. There will always need to be processes and experiences that can accept paper- and plastic-based documents. People needing to provide previous versions. People being old. People being offline.
And we’ll always need a range of accessibility options. And of course non-digital back-ups.
So I’d say much of the document scanning market is dead. Just not all of it. But that still makes for a frothy M&A opportunity to acquire and combine identity features, not just products.
The UK's e-signature laws are still in the Dark Ages
The excellent Richard Oliphant on why and how the laws around UK digital signatures need a reboot.
“Laws are not static. They need to be modernised for the Digital Age and keep up with advances in technology.
“Laws should facilitate, and not obstruct, digital transformation”
Google announces Mariner, a Personal AI Agent
As predicted here a few weeks ago, and with absolutely perfect timing to wrap up Customer Futures 2024, Google has just published details of their new browser-based AI Agent.
A fast-follow to Anthropic’s Claude 3.5, and ‘Computer Use’ mode.
Mariner can view everything within the browser, can type, click, scrape and act. Much more on this in a post soon.
But for now notice that they have gone to great lengths to say this is ‘experimental’ and ‘a research prototype’. This is obviously about lowering expectations, not least because many reports are that the browser agent is very slow.
But still, Google heralds that this is ‘a fundamentally new UX paradigm shift’.
You bet. And pushing us further along the track to Empowerment Tech.
Says TechCrunch:
“These shifts could affect millions of businesses — from publishers like TechCrunch, to retailers like Walmart — which have historically relied on Google to send real people to visit and use their websites.
Welcome everyone to the future of being a digital customer.
Here’s my favourite part:
“Google’s agent cannot check out, as it’s not supposed to fill out credit card numbers or billing information. Project Mariner also won’t accept cookies for users or sign a terms of service agreement. Google says it purposefully doesn’t allow the agent to do these things, in order to give users more control.”
Ah, so this is about control? Really? Or is it really about fraud and liability?
I predict that digital wallets and verifiable credentials are going to play a key role in this new AI agent world.
Why?
Many people joke that payments is the killer app for identity.
I now believe that AI agents will be the killer app for digital wallets.
And remember, these early AI platforms are the worst this tech will be. It can only get faster, more secure, more private.
Let’s see where this one goes, and if Google can build enough trust - and a sustainable position on liability - to get their AI Agent to scale.
AI Agents will require accountability…. and accountability will require identity
If we want the next generation of digital transformation, then we’re going to need the next generation of digital ID. That means verifiable and authentic data.
Great observations by Evin McMullen at PrivadoID. On why AI agents are going to need identity to be accountable.
The Decentralised Identity Stalemate
James Monaghan points out that with decentralised ID, each of the issuers, holders, verifiers can often have different motivations, and blockers, to adoption.
The question then, is how can we escape the stalemate?
He points to:
End-to-end use cases - meaning specific, tangible applications to create momentum
Ecosystems - where credentials can flow freely, triggering network effects
I would add another perspective. The best tech never wins… it’s the solutions with the best distribution that win.
Note that Google already has a digital wallet, control of the browser, AI agents (that can act in and for that browser), maps, flight booking, and much more. Not to mention they are embedded in the German Government’s innovation programme for the EU Digital Identity Wallet.
On the other side of the market, Apple has the silicon, the OS, a wallet, handsome income from paid data storage, and an assistant that’s already embedded and synced across multiple devices.
I’m not saying either will succeed at Decentralised ID. Nor that they will win.
But:
Both companies have already demonstrated how verifiable credentials can be exchanged between their wallets (decentralised ID is not only on their radar, but in development)
They have distribution
And that might just make all the difference to break the stalemate.
We're thinking about identity verification and AI agents in reverse
In many countries today, there are already more SIM cards than people. So we can be confident that there will be many times more AI Agents than people on the planet.
Thomas Canfarotta has correctly concluded the non-obvious impact:
The issue won’t just be verifying AI shoppers. It will be giving AI agents the tools to verify human customers too.
That’s a wrap for 2024. Stay tuned for more Customer Futures soon, both here and over at LinkedIn.
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