TikTok could become the world’s largest Empowerment Tech player, and Apple's AI models are the real privacy move we’ve been waiting for
TikTok could become the world’s largest Empowerment Tech player, and Apple's AI models are the real privacy move we’ve been waiting for
Plus: Google is going all-in on AI agents, and the EU has defined a model for Digital Trust - and it’s all about digital wallets
Hi everyone 👋
Thanks for coming back to Customer Futures. Each week I unpack the disruptive shifts around Empowerment Tech. Digital wallets, Personal AI and digital customer relationships.
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First, a huge thank you to all who came along to this week’s London Meetup.
It was great to catch up with old friends and make new ones. And to talk about the latest whirlwind of activity around personal data, Empowerment Tech and of course Personal AI.
A reminder: the next Customer Futures meetup is in two weeks during the EIC conference. We’ll be in Berlin on Tuesday 4th June, 7-10pm (details here).
And a quick announcement for an exclusive invitation during EIC week:
Ping Identity is holding a Decentralized Identity (DID) summit the day before EIC starts, on 3rd June in Berlin.
It’s an event for both banks and merchants/businesses, with an open-format discussion focussed on ‘Bank ID’.
Topics will include:
A deep dive into next-generation bank ID (and cross-border banking)
Current and proposed regulations around verifiable credential schemas - especially around bank customer credentials
Preventing fraud, ensuring privacy, and minimizing risk
How banking credentials can be used across retail, insurance, travel, hospitality and other sectors
Would be great to see you there!
WHEN: Monday 3 June 2024, 1pm-5pm (happy hour to follow)
WHERE: Park Inn by Radisson, Alexanderplatz. 7, 10178, Berlin
APPLY: There are limited spaces, so please apply to register here.
It’s been a pretty big couple of weeks for those watching Personal AI.
OpenAI announces a blisteringly fast new ‘GPT-4o’ with voice chat. (They also had a massive PR screw-up by using a copy of Scarlet Johansen’s voice, but that’s for another post).
And Google released some huge updates to their AI platform, Gemini.
It’s fair to say that both were milestone events. Certainly for Personal AI. Some say ‘this is the future’. But as I wrote about here last year, and as Doc Searls reminds us, both are Personalized, not Personal.
The difference matters.
This newsletter won’t give you another hot take. But it will point you to some of the signals in the noise around the future of being a digital customer.
So welcome back to the Customer Futures newsletter.
In this week’s edition:
Can TikTok become the world’s largest Empowerment Tech player?
UK consumers are bored of ‘brandmin’
The EU has defined a model for Digital Trust - and it’s all about digital wallets
Google is going all-in on AI agents
Apple’s latest open-source, on-device AI models are the real privacy move we’ve been waiting for
What can be done by personal AI, will be done by Personal AI
Do we need protection against unwanted 'hauntings' by AI chatbots of dead loved ones?
Warning for retailers: don’t lock in for retention, lock in for value
… plus other links about the future of digital customers you don’t want to miss
Let’s Go.
Can TikTok become the world’s largest Empowerment Tech player?
In 2020 the US Govt, for national security reasons, decided that TikTok should be forced to sell its US operations. Microsoft, and another bidding group including Oracle and Walmart, were considered the likely buyers.
The case has rumbled through courts since then, and is now back in the news with a twist.
What if an Empowerment Tech company bought TikTok?
A new consortium backed by Frank McCourt (from Project Liberty), and Tim Berners-Lee (from you know, the web), has emerged to try to buy the social media company.
It seems they would migrate TikTok user accounts over to their own, new Decentralized Social Networking Protocol.
You can guess the story without having to read the details. More control over digital identity and personal data. More control over the ‘feed’. And the option for users to monetise their data for themselves.
It matters because social media is today’s smoking crisis.
For the last 20 years, a generation of digital early adopters haven’t been made aware of the risks, and the BigTech platforms have gone to lengths to hide the issues. (Remind you of anything, Big Tabacco?)
Digital addiction and the resulting mental health challenges - particularly across teens - is now endemic.
TBL says the proposed new approach “will embrace the critical values of privacy, data sovereignty, and user mental health.”
I can only hope so. It would be amazing if they were successful. And it would make TikTok the largest ET company on the planet overnight.
UK consumers are bored of ‘brandmin’
New research from Twilio says that crappy customer experiences lead to over a third of customers taking their business elsewhere.
‘Brandmin’ (ok stop it) is just irritating full stop. Here are the top customer complaints:
Being put on hold (43%)
Being passed around departments or incorrectly transferred (43%)
Lengthy resolution processes (27%)
Multi-factor authentication (25%)
Complicated returns processes (22%)
Why should you care? Because digital wallets won’t just be about tokens or identity. And they won’t just be about data.
They will be a whole new digital customer channel.
One that the customer controls, and that can automate steps on the customer side. Soon my Personal AI will be able to do much of the above for me. Just look at what Google announced with Gemini (more on that below).
When nearly 20% of customers complain about being forced into interactions on channels they don’t want to use, or having to reach out at inconvenient times, Empowerment Tech and Personal AI are going to have a massive impact on digital commerce full stop.
These customer experience issues are solvable people. We just need new trusted digital customer tools.
We need Empowerment Tech.
And it’s coming.
The EU has defined a model for Digital Trust - and it’s all about digital wallets
Getting the eIDAS2 regulation through 27 member states has been a complicated beast. And while it’s taken a while (though compared to some other personal data-related regulations, it’s been lightning-fast), it’s now finally progressed into law.
But regulations don’t define specific technologies. Only principles and outcomes.
So there’s been a whole parallel track of effort to define how the EU Digital Wallet will work. To develop an ‘architecture and reference framework’ (ARF) for the citizen digital wallet.
An expert group has been beavering away at the ARF for many months. Yes, it’s technical. But it also describes the EU identity wallet conceptual Trust Model, and how it will actually work in practice (chapter 6 of the ARF).
You can see the latest updates on Github (link below).
This matters because much like the GDPR became the high-water market for data protection regulation around the world, so too might the ARF become a model for digital trust.
Not just a ‘people should have data portability’ rally. But a view on HOW citizens and consumers can activate that data portability.
These details matter. How should you prove to a business that it’s you asking for a digital copy of your data, for example? This single question has been one of the biggest sticking points in the Open Banking movement.
And one that the ARF now answers.
The EU’s model for Digital Trust, when applied to 300M people, will have far-reaching implications.
It’s worth a read.
Google is going all-in on AI agents
Google’s latest updates to its AI platform Gemini are pretty impressive. But through an Empowerment Tech lens, you can see that they are Going Big on AI agents.
Go watch the crazy video demo from Project Astra. It’s Google’s vision for the future of AI assistants. (link to the video below).
Separately though I want to point to some of the other AI agents they just announced:
Email agent
It’s a bot that can continuously organise all receipts in your inbox into a spreadsheet. It can automatically return an order for you. And it can sort through multiple conversations and files to answer questions. And much more.
I’m interested in this because, for the time being at least, email is the dominant e-commerce channel for receipts, for bookings, and keeping track of digital life.
Having an AI agent handle a bunch of that for you is an obvious first step. And perhaps the first killer app for Personal AI. Because the data is already sitting there in your inbox.
Search agent
It’s a bot that can plan multi-step trips, with multi-step research. And it has ‘reasoning’, so it can find and book a local event or gym class or whatever. It can search and research to prepare a meal plan for example.
A browser agent
This bot will work across multiple websites to do tasks for you. Like form filling or updating your address in multiple places. The ‘Change Of Address’ flow has been the poster child use case for Personal Data Stores since 2009.
But the question - of course - always comes back to digital ID. How will the business confirm that it’s me making the change?
So we can expect a wave of new digital fraud attacks. But you can see that a browser agent starts to scratch the Empowerment Tech itch.
Zoom out, and you can see that Google doing Personal AI is inevitable.
They have our location (maps), email (pretty much your lifestream outside ‘Social’), and an increasing share of work life (Google Docs, GSuite and so on). That’s before you add in their digital dossier on you. Including your browsing history and all the searches you’ve been making for the last 20 years.
This first announcement on AI Agents is just bread on the water.
The big question will be how they pivot their ‘Search’ business into this new Personal AI channel. One for another post (coming soon).
SUMMARY OF GOOGLE’S AGENT UPDATES
Apple’s latest open-source, on-device AI models are the real privacy move we’ve been waiting for
Apple is known for its marketing campaigns around privacy. On-device data. Masked email addresses. The ‘What Goes On iPhone Stays On iPhone' ads.
So we can expect any upcoming AI announcements to push the same narrative. And we’ll find out more at Apple’s next Worldwide Developers Conference on the 10th of June.
Why are folks predicting some juicy AI updates this time? Because Apple just released eight new ‘on-device’ AI models. And they’ve open-sourceed them no less. Not very ‘Apple’, who has always kept tech a closed shop.
And it’s widely expected they’ll announce a new version of Siri, powered by OpenAI’s latest model, GPT-4o (more on that below).
I can see an Apple Empowerment Tech story emerging.
The combination of:
Their existing and massive iCloud business (personal vault)
Their existing and massive Apple Wallet business (digital wallet)
A new on-device, AI-powered Siri (personal AI)
So far so ET. But then throw in some competitive dynamics:
They have solid distribution (17% of the handset market worldwide, 30% in the EU and 61% in the US)
They have the hardware/silicon to power an on-device Personal AI (side question: does ‘on-device AI’ change the conversation about AI energy consumption, costs and the carbon footprint?)
They have the billing relationship (they already charge users $100s every year for ‘services’ not hardware)
They are quietly adding digital ID (20+ US states are already adding direct integration of StateIDs)
Might Apple be the one to watch around normalising Empowerment Tech at scale? We’ll find out soon.
But you can bet that whatever they announce will supported by an expensive marketing campaign around privacy and digital trust.
And most of all, you can bet that it will ‘just work’.
What can be done by personal AI, will be done by Personal AI
Let’s assume GPT-4o powers the next-gen version of Apple Siri. Smart answers from the web, conversational AI, helping you manage your day. Fantastic.
But what happens when you give it access to your health data records from Apple Health, and other device-based health apps?
Tech celebrity Robert Scoble has some ideas, and has friends working on it:
“Take six months of all your health data from the Apple Health app. V02 max trend + ox sat + sleep data + resting heart rate + workout recovery data.
“Ask ChatGPT to give you a diagnosis about your general health and include your height, weight, and age.
“Then ask for a health plan to put you in optimal health in a set period of time.”
Putting the privacy and on-device processing questions aside (which you can expect Apple to handle as part of the release), this gets pretty important, pretty quickly.
I can’t stress this enough. We are living through a digital and AI exponential.
Where the secret ingredient won’t be the power of the LLM. Nor the device. It will be the personal data we feed the models.
May I be bold enough to propose Jamie’s Law: What can be done by personal AI, will be done by Personal AI.
If I’m right, within 5 years we’ll be outsourcing (PAI-sourcing?) much of our digital and work lives to AI-powered digital assistants. And that’s going to involve A LOT of personal data and insights.
So we must look deeper. There are fundamental questions to ask, and fast:
WHO trains your AI model? What’s their tolerance for risk? What happens when (not if) things go wrong?
With WHAT data? How does consent work in this new world? Can you ‘undo’ training (yes you can exclude some interactions from training public models, but the Good Stuff is going to come when we do things just for us, using the firehose of personal data from our devices).
And WHY? Follow the money… who is paying for what, when, why and what are the unintended consequences?
WHERE is the model run, and the data processed? And where do the outputs go and who gets to see them?
It’s one of the main reasons I’m so interested in Apple’s positioning here.
Siri-on-steroids with GPT-4o and -5? Sure.
Help me plan. Help me write. Help me communicate. Help me make sense of my to-do list.
Even scan my emails to help me switch energy provider, and set up reminders for the school play.
But here’s the gap: what about all the unstructured personal data that we can’t see right now?
Once these assistants become truly personal, and deeply get to know us, they will quickly wander into uncharted territory.
Data from our long-term relationships. Our growth. Our hopes. Our worries. Our concerns. Our interests. Our dreams.
The data that makes us feel vulnerable.
It’s where AI may become the most helpful to people - but also present the most risks.
Will people share that information with BigTech AIs? I’m not sure.
So which brands will have the positioning - and the digital trust - to truly help us every day?
Do we need protection against unwanted 'hauntings' by AI chatbots of dead loved ones?
Researchers at Cambridge University have published a warning about ‘GriefBots’.
“These are AI chatbots that simulate the language patterns and personality traits of the dead using the digital footprints they leave behind.
“Some companies are already offering these services, providing an entirely new type of "postmortem presence."
Sad, but predictable perhaps.
It’s all part of an emerging market for the “digital afterlife”. The researchers are now highlighting the potential consequences of careless design, in an area of AI that they say is very high risk.
There’s a bigger question here. What controls should be in place for the ‘digital afterlife’? Who inherits data?
Of course, it’s part of the Empowerment Tech story. And about who should be able to control your data when you can’t. I know of dozens of projects already working on these kinds of problems:
How should ‘digital power of attorney’ work, when an individual can’t control their own digital affairs (e.g. in old age)?
How should digital wallets (and Empowerment Tech) work for children and vulnerable groups like refugees?
How will verifiable credentials work for products and objects, like cars and boilers?
What about living creatures like pets? Will they have digital wallets too? (spoiler: yes)
Empowerment Tech presents a HUGE opportunity for all this and more. But, as we see with GriefBots, the governance and regulations around personal data - and the legal control over the data of others - are about to get much, much more complicated.
Warning for retailers: don’t lock in for retention, lock in for value
What do marketers think about privacy? What about engineers?
As Borja Santaolalla reminds us, different groups think differently:
“People in retail react differently to privacy. Most of them relate it to regulation and data protection, the boring (yet much needed) stuff.
“Engineers relate it to data security and encryption. Marketeers relate it to consent, "cookieless" data collection, and a decline in campaign performance."
“Customer and loyalty teams relate it to the collection, persistance and activation of first party data, and the 360º view of the customer.”
These differences of view are why we see such a varied response to privacy inside businesses.
But there’s another emerging group inside businesses we need to talk to.
Those who see privacy as an opportunity for new revenue streams. For digital growth. And to re-boot the customer relationship.
They believe that privacy is related to ‘empowerment’. Where free and respected customers are more valuable than ‘captive’ ones.
Go back and read that last sentence again. It took me a long time to fully understand what it meant. The idea has roots in the Cluetrain Manifesto, first published in 1999. (Go read it, it’s evergreen).
Captive customers can’t leave. They end up resenting the product or service. It becomes a ‘grudge buy’.
Maybe they are locked in because there aren’t any other options available. Or due to the switching costs. Or maybe because of the ‘points’ they accumulate and are forced to use (hilariously called ‘loyalty’).
But free customers, who have a choice to leave, are the lifeblood of a business.
Why?
Because they are making an active choice to stay. They are the customers who will spend more. Buy more. Recommend more.
The Customer Futures take: don’t lock in for retention, lock in for value.
Because customer retention is an outcome, not a feature. And it all boils down to customer trust.
But how do we measure that?
The UK Retail Trust Index (RTI) has been tracking UK customer trust in retail for a couple of years now. It’s run by the Ethical Commerce Alliance (ECA).
The 2024 results are out, and they’ve uncovered some pretty interesting stuff. Last year for example they showed that a quarter of customers actively avoid being tracked online.
You mean by using browser protection? Or a techy-savvy VPN?
Nope.
23% simply choose another retailer. And 24% shop in-store instead.
The RTI takes the data and then ranks all retailers in the UK according to trust (including scores on privacy, security and accessibility). It’s a fascinating list.
The ECA folks are experts in Empowerment Tech, and are now working with some of the world’s largest retailers to explore new solutions for privacy and empowering consumers.
On 19th June the ECA are running an event in London to talk about the Retail Trust Index, Empowerment Tech, and more.
I’ll be there. Want to come? You can sign up at the link just below.
ECA EVENT IN JUNE, RETAIL TRUST INDEX
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:
Post: Slack forgets GDPR Article 7 (Conditions for consent) READ
Article: What Do You Do When AI Takes Your Voice? READ
News: OpenAI dissolves team focused on long-term AI risks, less than one year after announcing it READ
Announcement: New call for grants for Large Scale Pilots to test the EU Digital Identity Wallet (Business, Payments and Banking, Travel and Age Verification) READ
Post: Microsoft, IBM and Amazon walked away from emotion detection and facial recognition READ
News: Trinsic launches reusable digital ID network with biometrics partners READ
And that’s a wrap. Stay tuned for more Customer Futures soon, both here and over at LinkedIn.
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