Will enterprises pay $2 per AI agent conversation, and Gartner's 500M users of digital ID wallets by 2026
Plus: Mandating personal identity data (PIDs) in the EU, proving that a digital object belongs to me, and what’s missing from the UK Government’s new ‘One Login’?
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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This week’s newsletter is brought to you by the letters E and T, and by the number 25.
As I’ve said before, when it comes to Empowerment Tech, especially digital wallets, technology is at most 25% of the answer.
And yet that is where most of the heat and light seems to be coming from around digital wallets. Below the waterline.
How they work, not what they can do or why.
OK so what’s missing?
Well for starters, governance frameworks. The (machine-readable) documents that describe the trust lists, and who can do what. The governance bodies needed to audit and approve things like the wallets themselves.
These frameworks will also cover how the relevant regulations apply to specific industries and use cases. And detail the commercial models and rules.
Then there’s the UI paradigm. Will digital wallets be invisible? Will they be chat-based? Image-based? Swipe-based? All to be worked through.
Then there’s the value. Why on earth will people care about wallets and data? (Spoiler: they won’t). So what are the use cases, the jobs to be done, the benefits and ROI?
But finally - and perhaps most importantly - why will wallets (and their cousins, digital smart agents) be trusted?
Yes, digital wallets will be adopted when they create value for people and businesses. But they won’t scale unless and until we can trust them. Until we can trust what they are doing with data. Who can see what, and why.
Much of that will come from who operates the wallets.
Will it be today’s brands (offering commercial wallets)? Or governments (citizen wallets)? Or NGOs (beneficiary wallets)?
Will it be new startups (for Gen Z, A, B wallets)? Or perhaps the businesses with the customers already… the large enterprises? Then there’s the obvious - and most likely to dominate - BigTech players (offering customer wallets)?
That, my dear friends, is the golden question.
If we want to create new, private and secure decentralised data ecosystems, then who will provide digital wallets is fast becoming one of the biggest questions to crack.
And which organisations will perform which roles, under what rules, and for whom.
So let’s move beyond the tech, shall we? To the why and what of digital wallets and Empowerment Tech, not just the how.
Yes, Apple. Yes, Google. But will they move into specific industries like travel, health, insurance and cars? Perhaps not, more likely staying ‘horizontal’. Offering identity, payments, loyalty and so on.
So where will the other players come from? What will be their unique advantage?
I’m assuming it will be in domain-specific workflows. Like recruitment, travel, health and money. Where there are industry-specific requirements, and domain-specific credentials. There also needs to be employee- and customer-specific experiences.
Maybe your company is already building or launching something? Let me know, perhaps I can help. I’m already working with some Empowerment Tech companies at the moment on this exact question. Get in touch.
Of course, 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
Will enterprises pay $2 per AI agent conversation?
500M users of digital ID wallets by 2026, apparently
Proving that a digital object belongs to me
Will it be acceptable to mandate personal identity data (PID) in the EU?
Ofcom (UK media and telco regulator) on how to mitigate the harms of Deceptive Deepfakes
What’s missing from the UK Government’s new ‘One Login’?
Let’s Go.
Will enterprises pay $2 per AI agent conversation?
Marc Benioff, CEO of Salesforce, has been bullish - and vocal - about Agent AI for a while now. And Salesforce has just announced its AI Agent platform. Exciting stuff.
Lots of co-pilot and automation things as you’d expect. But I have two big questions.
First, this is all excellent business-side AI. But when and where will Personal AI, agents on the customer side, show up?
I’m assuming some will be sector-specific tools for individuals, trained on domains like health, travel and insurance. Others will be more like general AI assistants, trained on your calendar, contacts, payments and email.
Who are the leading companies working on those?
Second, Benioff talks about a consumption-based pricing model.
“We've had non-human consumption-based products for quite a long time at Salesforce.
“My goal is that by the end of fiscal year '26 that we will have a billion agents. Already in just looking at the number of consumers identified just in the trials that we have going on, we have like 100 million identified or more. Okay. call it, 200 million.
“But the funny thing is, of course, it's only one agent. But let's just think it's like a manifestation of all these agents talking to all these consumers. And then when we look at pricing, it will be on a consumption basis. And when we think about that, we think about saying to our customers, and we have, it's about $2 per conversation.”
OK now it gets interesting. $2 per AI conversation.
I can see why that might make sense to businesses, who can then lower their costs, increase conversion and open up new revenue streams.
But what about the commercial model for people? On the customer side?
Might some people pay $5/month for a personal AI that can save them hours per day, not to mention the cost savings on their monthly spend? And what does a free, or freemium, version look like?
That’s the digital transformation I’m looking for. And by the way, the next $bn market.
500M users of digital ID wallets by 2026, apparently
It’s a bold claim.
Not credentials issued. Not citizens downloading a digital wallet. It’s the actual use of a digital ID wallet, according to Gartner.
Here’s the prediction in black and white. “At least 500 million smartphone users will be regularly making verifiable claims using a digital identity wallet (DIW)”.
‘Regularly’ is the question.
Daily? Monthly? Annually? Of course, I’d love to be wrong. But you’d expect that something regular feels like at least every week or so.
So what’s behind the 500M wallets? Good question.
We can’t look at the issuance side of things, because this prediction is about use. About acceptance.
And so stats about downloads don’t help. Like the Mobile Driving License in the US (2M+). Or the expected adoption of the EU Digital Identity Wallet (80% of 300M+ citizens will be offered a digital wallet, by law).
Then there’s Singapore and other countries in APAC that are heading towards digital wallets by default. And you can add Digi Yatra, the citizen travel wallet in India that’s connected to the 1BN+ records in Adhaar.
Given the wording in the report, about the IDV and ‘selfie’ market, plus EU digital wallets, we should assume they are not including China’s digital wallets. Those would blow the stats out of the water anyway.
Piecing it together, you can start to see a path towards 500M people. But remember, we’re hunting for regular use. Likely weekly.
So is this about age checks? About government login? About new customer onboarding? About peer-to-peer interactions?
A meaningful number, maybe. But 500M people using a digital ID wallet regularly in the next 24 months?
There’s another angle here.
Over half of all e-commerce payment transactions around the world are already made with a mobile payment wallet. And by 2026 it’s expected that 60% of the global population will use digital wallets for payments.
It’s not a huge leap to say that those wallet providers will add digital ID pretty quickly. Both Apple (6 US States launched so far, with 30+ in the pipeline), and Google (just announced ‘scan your government passport’) are already there. And Samsung Pay is connected to the huge Indian ID platforms.
Then it’s only another hop to suggest those wallets will include other types of credentials. Employment. Tickets. Access. Loyalty. Google, Apple and Samsung already do.
So maybe we’re heading towards ‘Payments Plus’.
Payment plus loyalty. Payment plus identity. Payment plus age check. Payment plus entitlement. Same transaction, same experience, same security.
Maybe Gartner’s 500M prediction isn’t so wild.
The question now becomes: which wallets, which use cases, and which people?
Digital ID wallets need acceptance networks. And those take time to build.
Perhaps today’s payments networks and digital checkout are the ID acceptance points we’ve been staring at this whole time?
Proving that a digital object belongs to me
FaceTec has developed a new way to add biometrics to a QR code, so I can prove that a digital object credential is mine. But without having to share the biometric itself.
Great idea. Should this be an open standard?
Will it be acceptable to mandate personal identity data in the EU?
ID expert Bryn Robinson-Morgan digs into the EU’s plans for ‘Personal Identity Information’ (PID). The new guidelines define ‘mandatory fields’ to prove so-called uniqueness.
“For survivors of domestic abuse, changing one’s name can be a breakpoint from the past, whether for their own mental health or safety from their abuser. For those who have transitioned gender, taking a new name can also be an important part of their journey.
“A PID containing these names at birth does not afford the right to privacy and therefore cannot deliver equity for those who do not wish to have these details included for very valid reasons.
“Providing validated attributes for names at birth, with strong assurance that they relate to the citizen’s current name, will be a challenge for Member States. Even for the well documented, showing the link from a current to former name often becomes more challenging over time.
“It is not uncommon for someone to have had many names – e.g. born, married, divorced, remarried – either so the number of linking events can be extremely complicated. Even more so for people resident in a country different from their birth, and for under documented individuals.”
The current EU approach to the PID triggers deep issues about privacy, equity and usability. He suggests we use this moment, providing feedback on the draft eIDAS2 Implementing Acts, to raise these important questions. And see if we understand quite where we are headed.
Ofcom (UK media and telco regulator) on how to mitigate the harms of Deceptive Deepfakes
Nearly 50% of people in the UK (including children 8-15 yrs) say they’ve come across deepfakes in the last 6 months.
This Ofcom paper covers what’s happening, why it matters and what we can do. Includes some ideas around digitally signing content.
What’s missing from the UK Government’s new ‘One Login’?
I wonder if the UK’s OneLogin system might become one of the last, great (£200M+) centralised ID schemes built in the modern age. At least some of that money is going towards understanding users.
They’ve just completed important and detailed research into UK citizen identity, and found that up to 10% of users don’t have enough of a digital footprint to prove their ID (a mobile phone contract, active bank account, credit cards, loans, or mortgages).
Not a huge gap, but a gap.
But here’s the really interesting finding. About those under 17:
46% don’t have a phone number (they have a mobile but without a phone number)
20% don’t have an email address
Just think about that. How much today do we rely on SMS and email to prove we have access to an account? It’s mad if you think about it.
Digital wallets, including those in the EU Digital Identity Wallet, can become a new way to verify who we are. And to hold much more digital information about us than just from the bank, telco or energy company.
Our digital ID can, and should, be made up of many different parts of us. But it’s not today because we can’t trust where the data came from.
But that’s all about to change with Empowerment Tech. We’ll be able to prove, privately and securely:
Where our identity data came from
Who it was given to
If it’s been tampered with
If the data attribute has been revoked
When all you’ve got is a hammer (a centralised, £200M identity programme), everything looks like a nail (personal identity attributes from banks, mobile phone companies and email providers).
It’s a huge gap.
And one we can fill with verifiable credentials and digital wallets.
With Empowerment Tech.
And that’s a wrap. Stay tuned for more Customer Futures soon, both here and over at LinkedIn.
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