The unexpected opportunity with AI agents - designing for customer friction
When we automate away all the friction from customer experiences… what will be left for customer engagement?
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Each week I unpack the ever-increasing and disruptive shifts around digital wallets, Personal AI and digital customer relationships.
This is the PERSPECTIVE edition.
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This week’s post is a deep dive on customer friction.
Why businesses hate it, why it matters, and why AI Agents are going to matter a great deal.
Beyond the AI Agent Koolaid, there’s a serious and important point to be made about what it means for designing customer experiences. Because when we automate away all customer interactions, what’s left? And do people care?
As ever, it’s all about the future of being a digital customer. So welcome back to the Customer Futures newsletter.
In this ‘perspective’ edition we cover:
What can be automated will be automated
The twist will be on the customer’s side
Building trust with friction
Why we need to become more human, not less
Hope you enjoy it. Would love your feedback. Feel free to drop me a line.
Let’s go.
What can be automated will be automated
Almost all companies today are on a journey to digitise All The Things. To improve performance. To reduce costs. To automate everything in sight.
Auto-magical.
Businesses are now spending billions to automate away as many processes and customer interactions as possible. And AI is putting this automation on warp speed.
It’s all about reaching that customer holy grail. To become proactive instead of being reactive to customer needs. Even faster. Even cheaper. Even more seamless.
Zero-touch! Frictionless!
But human-less?
There’s a very real risk that customers are being forgotten in this tsunami of digital efficiency.
Why?
Look closely, and you’ll see that all this digital value is really only being created on the business side. Because the customer still needs to jump through those particular hoops. And tap those particular buttons on that particular app.
And do that for Each. Particular. Business.
The great irony is that the customer side remains pre-industrial.
Full of manual labour and errors. Lugging our digital selves from place to place. Working for the land owners. Producing vast data troves to be collected by businesses, pumped into platforms that create even more company value.
The twist will be on the customer’s side
Consumers are now getting their own AI. Personal AI. New digital agents that work for them. As a result, customers will soon return the digital transformation favour.
As customers we’ll make sense of our own data, on our side of the market. That elusive 360-degree view of the customer finally becomes possible. But this time done for - and by - the individual.
All powered by AI.
And individuals will soon decide how much of that 360-degree profile to reveal - or not - to the business. And only when there’s enough value to do so. Only if the business is trusted.
The explosion of automation on the business side will now be matched by customers. Using our own AI Agents and digital wallets, people will be able to automate away all the boring, repetitive and manual steps they deal with every day.
Collecting and managing all that admin. The forms. The logins. The dealing with contact centres. Digging out the correct order number at the right time. Handling the chaos of receipts, scattered across a thousand web accounts we’ve already forgotten about (and can’t remember how to log into anyway).
Our Personal AI assistants will surface that perfect piece of information, just when it’s needed. The ticket stub. The policy number. The hospital appointment location. The size of bulb you need. The meter reading for a new utility provider.
With digital wallets and smart AI assistants, customers will become as well-informed about themselves, as businesses do today. What they’ve done and where they’ve been. The patterns. The insights. The things they’ve bought. The connections they’ve made. What they might want next. How to return and upgrade things.
Overnight, people will get their own personal Chief Operating Officer. Come to think of it, they’ll get their own CTO and Chief Data Officer too.
All under their own control. All private. All automated. And of course, all auditable so they can track what’s happened (and rewind where needed).
This isn’t about flying taxis. About cool new tech that’s 10 or 15 years away. This is happening right now.
Here’s a snippet of some of the latest mad AI Agent breakthroughs (h/t to Rajesh Godel):
Microsoft: Multi-Agent web navigation support (link)
Google and Standford: AI Agent simulation of 1,000 people using audio (link)
Meta: Planning and Reasoning in Embodied Multi-agent Tasks (link)
Harvard: LLM Multi-Agent System with Verbal Reinforcement for Financial Decisions (link)
Adobe: AI Agent that creates its own functions (link)
Salesforce: Method to test CRM Agents (link)
Anthropic: GUI Agents and Claude computer use (link)
This stuff will be on our devices and in our apps before you can say ‘digital assistant.’
Claude’s computer use is already out in the wild. Google’s Jarvis is due any week now. And ChatGPT5 is expected in the new year (though there’s an OpenAI announcement coming at Christmas apparently).
These teams are all building Autonomous AI Assistants that can be given a goal, where the AI agent will go away and get the job done within the constraints you give it.
Those constraints could be ordering the most recommended option, the cheapest version, or simply the fastest one. And you can give the AI Agents specific tools to get the work done. That could include access to APIs for payments, access to Dropbox or Google maps, permission to use your browser, and perhaps even your browsing history. The list is endless.
My point is that this is all being assembled now. We are going to be able to automate All The Things.
Back to real customer engagement
Here’s where I’m going with this. In the next 24 months, AI Agents are going to be doing the doing. Both for businesses (everything from handling customer services to customer acquisition) and customers (bookings, returns, planning, account admin).
Exciting stuff. And lucrative for the AI Agents platforms.
But here’s a question.
If businesses automate away all the wasteful steps and interactions… and customers do the same on their side… then what’s really left? What will an AI-powered customer journey really mean?
‘Customer engagement’ is about to be completely redefined, but this time by the customer.
Let’s assume that our personal AIs will become smart enough to handle the things people don’t want to do. So what’s left is… the real customer engagement. Those steps, those moments, where customers want to be engaged.
In other words, by automating and eradicating the Bad Stuff, we can strip things back to only the Important and Engaging Stuff.
Let’s call it Good Friction.
Service designers already know this. When something is too easy to do, too frictionless, it loses its appeal. Customers get suspicious.
Why?
Think of the last time you were offered a product or service where it felt too good to be true. “What’s the catch?” you ask yourself. It’s your gut telling you that you need some friction. You need to feel that there’s effort required, some sacrifice. No such thing as a free lunch.
When the restaurant meal comes out of the kitchen just a little too fast… you have to question when, how (and possibly where) it was prepared.
Because friction is a way we build trust.
There’s a famous example from the 1950s, when General Mills was trying to market a new zero-effort cake mix. The mix produced perfect and delicious cakes every time, but initial sales were terrible. It was a psychologist who finally discovered that it was because bakers felt guilty. Getting the credit for making wonderful cakes, but with such little effort.
The company’s response was risky, but inspired. Rather than address this guilt issue with an obvious marketing campaign (“save time and spend it with family!”), they changed the product.
Bakers were instead asked to ‘add an egg’ to the mix. In other words, the company introduced some friction, some effort.
They added Good Friction. And cake mix sales boomed.
As businesses continue to dial digital transformation up to 11, AI is going to turn it up all the way to 74. So we need to reflect on what ‘engagement’ really means. What Good Friction we actually want.
As Soups Ranjan from Sardine reminds us about friction in financial services, “Would you rather wait a minute or two to confirm a large transaction or get to it instantly with a higher risk of fraud?”
Amazon’s friction-free shopping experience is another good example. Their ‘Just Walk Out’ stores offer what can only be described as legal shoplifting. You pick up what you need from inside the store, and then just walk out with it.
Guess what? They’re now closing store after store. It’s not taken off the way they hoped. Here’s what their global head of grocery said about it earlier this year:
“We are shifting the focus away from frictionless Just Walk Out, which allows customers to scan their phones on entry to a store, fill their bags with products and leave without any interaction with staff or a self-checkout machine.
“Instead we are prioritising Dash Carts – a trolley fitted with self-scan devices as well as a built-in weighing scale in the basket, and touchscreen to view live receipts and product recommendations.”
Consumers clearly feel a little weird about shopping without interacting with anyone. When things are too easy. It feels like Amazon’s response - the Dash Carts and self scan devices - are the ‘Add An Egg’ response of 2024.
John Sills is the Managing Partner of The Foundation, and a world-leading expert on customer experiences. As he puts it, customer friction is really about needing certainty (is this the right thing?), memory (is it happening too fast to remember?) and value (was there enough effort put in?).
Becoming more human, not less
I’ve said for a long time that “The best experience is sometimes no experience”.
Removing as many steps as possible from the customer journey - even ideally the entire journey itself. And that’s true when the whole experience is really just full of Bad Friction. When it’s a grudge purchase, like setting up a utility provider account or basic banking.
But let’s look back at all this digital transformation business. The automation-of-everything.
What if ‘frictionless’ wasn’t the goal?
What if we deliberately design for more human experiences?
I love Ben Reason‘s thinking here, on designing for Thai chaos. How poor service can actually add to the experience. Because in a world of AI, of automated predictions and perfect seamlessness, we’ll need something to hang on to.
Experiences to create memories. To elicit joy. To make new connections.
And if the global pandemic and yo-yo lockdowns taught us anything, it’s that we need more connection.
Connect to experiences. To each other. And to Good Friction.
Our AI-infused and perfectly predicted world is going to need a human touch. A smile. Catching someone’s eye. And perhaps literally a human touch. Maybe a hug from an ex-colleague, or the shake of a hand.
(Side note: a handshake is actually one of the oldest forms of trust around. A demonstration of vulnerability, showing that you're not holding a sword).
There is a very real risk that with AI Agents we walk blindfolded into more isolation. Do you really want a perfectly frictionless life?
I don’t.
Because friction is about building trust. And what we need is connection. So let’s design for that. For connection. For Good Friction. And for trust.
What if we design our AI agents to build in friction? To introduce more trust?
Maybe now’s a good time to amend my maxim above. It was “The best experience is sometimes no experience.” But it should really be:
“The best experience will be the most authentic, connected human experience.”
In a world of dizzying and overwhelming AI Agents, it’s really we humans, our connections and trust, that are going to matter.
Remember, what can be automated will be automated. And that the real digital transformation is going to be on the customer’s side. Removing the Bad Friction.
The new opportunity is to design for Good Friction. And AI Agents are going to be able to help.
It’s all about the future of being a digital customer. And if we do it right, it’s about becoming more human, not less.
That’s a wrap. Stay tuned for more Customer Futures soon, both here and over at LinkedIn.
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Good friction: "Experiences to create memories. To elicit joy. To make new connections." #Exactly