Hi everyone, thanks for coming back to Customer Futures. Each week I unpack the fundamental shifts around Personal Agents, digital customer relationships and Empowerment Tech.
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Hi folks,
I’m just back from a family holiday that included some theme parks. My goodness the experience economy is alive and kicking.
You can digitise all you want, but humans are always going to want to do. To feel things.
And it’s really made me think about brands, and what happens when everything gets automated away with AI. Yes, jobs. Yes, efficiency. But also customer experiences.
Because experiences are about moments. About good friction (and of course too often bad friction). But with personal agents, what does customer friction look like? Will we care? And is checkout dead, as the tech folks keep screaming? Maybe.
So much - too much - of the debate is about agentic payments. Transactions. But we’re looking at the wrong end of the customer journey. The more interesting change isn’t about how customers transact with businesses. It’s about how they interact with them.
And how customers feel during a customer experience.
Because something quite profound is about to happen: Customers are getting their own new digital user interface.
And when that happens, businesses face a rather uncomfortable possibility.
They could become emotionally invisible.
Today I’m sharing my latest thinking around the impact of personal agents on the customer experience, on marketing, and on brands:
From the browser to the personal agent
Three new modes of customer conversation
The paradox of the invisible brand
Becoming Emotionally Invisible
The separation of transactions and relationships
Why marketing will have to change
Let’s go.
From the browser to the personal agent
Think about what happened when the web browser arrived.
Before the web, interacting with a business generally meant visiting a physical location, making a telephone call or responding to something through the post.
My goodness that feels a loooong time ago. A letter? From a company telling you about your account?
Then came the browser.
Suddenly, I could have two competing businesses open at the same time in different tabs. I could instantly compare products, read terms, check prices and decide which one got my attention.
I could leave one brand and visit another with a single click. The browser gave customers a new level of control.
But there was a catch.
Every time I visited a business, I still had to enter their world. Their website. Their navigation. Their product categories. Their search function. Their checkout process.
Businesses have spent billions over the last 30 years optimising these experiences, understanding customer behaviour, reducing friction and nudging us towards a decision that benefits them.
Then came app stores and a million new apps-per-company. Giving brands even more opportunities to shape the customer experience. And of course much more control.
Question for you: Which apps have you moved to your mobile phone’s home screen? Which get most of your attention every day, every hour? Which brands are now flashing in front of you when you open your phone 100 times a day?
But now something else is coming. For decades, businesses have designed - and tried to control - the customer experience.
Now customers are about to design their own CX. Instead of visiting ten websites or ten apps, and navigating ten interfaces, I’ll soon interact with those businesses through one interface.
Mine.
My personal AI agent will understand my preferences, context, history and what I’m trying to achieve. And it won’t just be limited to a chat window. It will list options, offer comparisons, create images and recommendations. It will be interactive, dynamic and personal.
It will meet my UI needs in that moment, not just what the company app team decided was one size fits all.
Maybe I just need a quick flash of an account status. Or just an alert that the account switch has taken place. Maybe I want some dynamic comparisons and side by side reviews of benefits.
It will all depend on what I need right then. And it will be designed, in that moment, for me.
Soon, interacting with a company - yes, including checkout - becomes increasingly headless. The products, services and transactions will still exist, but customers won’t need to experience them through a brand’s digital storefront.
You see, the browser and the app used to be a window into the business.
Now, the personal agent becomes a window into the customer’s world.
And that changes everything.
Three new modes of customer conversation
I think we’re heading towards three quite different modes of interaction using personal agents:
Direct
Orchestrated
Delegated
Let’s look at each.
Mode 1: DIRECT
It becomes one brand, one conversation.
Today, I visit a company’s website and use its chatbot. Tomorrow, I’ll ask my own AI assistant to connect me with the business and interact through it.
Perhaps I’m changing an insurance policy, moving a flight or discussing a mortgage. The business is still involved. Its systems, policies and services still matter. It might even have its own AI agent participating in the conversation.
But I don’t need to navigate its website. The brand remains part of the conversation, but no longer owns the interface.
Mode 2: ORCHESTRATED
It’s one experience, but with multiple brands.
This is where things become much more interesting.
Imagine I’m buying a car. Today, that means researching vehicles, comparing dealerships, exploring finance, checking insurance, understanding running costs and perhaps arranging a service plan. Each interaction involves a different business, website, app and customer journey.
I’m the one doing all the work.
Now imagine my personal agent brings everything together. It generates an interactive comparison of suitable cars, including total ownership costs. I change the assumptions and watch the numbers update. I compare insurance quotes alongside finance options and explore different scenarios.
It’s one experience. But with multiple businesses.
Or think about renting an apartment. Property listings, neighbourhood information, commuting times, schools, deposits, moving companies, utilities and government services.
Today, these are separate journeys. Tomorrow, they become part of a single experience organised around what I’m actually trying to achieve. My ‘jobs to be done’ according to Clay Christensen.
The customer journey no longer belongs to any individual brand. It belongs to the customer.
Mode 3: DELEGATE
Just do it for me.
The third mode is delegation. I don’t want a conversation at all. I simply want something done.
I’ve said for a long time that the best customer experience is sometimes no customer experience. Find out and fix why my broadband bill has increased. Arrange a service for my car. Challenge an incorrect charge. Check whether I can get a better insurance deal and sort it.
Soon, my agent handles the entire interaction. And notice that I didn’t say transaction. Because so much of the agentic commerce conversation is too narrow. It’s not all just about payments and checkout.
Rather, It’s all the other stuff.
The back and forth. The questions. The negotiation. The clarifications. The complaints. The follow-ups. All those moments where a business would traditionally have an opportunity to build a relationship with me.
The opportunities for good friction.
Now, my agent might handle them without me ever speaking to the business. Which creates an enormous problem for brands.
The paradox of the invisible brand
There’s a famous quote, often attributed to Maya Angelou:
People will forget what you said, but they will never forget how you made them feel.
It’s an important point about human relationships. And I think it might become one of the most important questions for the future of customer experience - and brands entirely.
If customers stop interacting directly with your brand, how will you make them feel anything?
Think about all the moments businesses currently use to create an emotional connection. The beautifully designed website. The helpful salesperson. The reassuring conversation. The thoughtful recommendation. The brilliant customer service response.
What happens when those moments are mediated by an AI agent? Or disappear entirely?
It’s a new paradox.
The better your agent becomes at serving customers, the less memorable your brand will become.
Look again at the insurance renewal that happens automatically. The agent checks the market, negotiates a better deal and renews the policy. Perfectly seamless. Zero friction. A fantastic customer experience.
Auto-magical.
But whose experience was it really? The customer’s agent did all the work. The insurer simply provided the product, perhaps via an MCP endpoint. The customer might not even remember which insurer they’re with.
The business has become functionally excellent. But yet emotionally invisible.
Of course, customers will still experience the products and services directly. Those moments become more important than ever. But many happen after the purchase. So how does a brand make someone feel something before they buy?
Transactions or relationships?
I suspect we’re heading towards a much clearer separation between two kinds of customer interaction: transactions vs relationships.
Let me explain.
Transactions are functional. I need something. You provide it. We agree on a price. The exchange happens.
There’s nothing wrong with that. Plenty of businesses will thrive by providing reliable products and services efficiently. In fact, agents could make transactional businesses dramatically more efficient.
But transactions are also relatively easy to compare, automate and replace.
If the only reason I use your business is because you offer a particular product at a particular price, my agent has very little reason to remain loyal when someone else offers a better deal.
It’s exactly what’s happened with Amazon marketplace. Lists of endless products and copycats offering a transaction. Rarely do I care about the brand.
But relationships are different.
They’re built through trust, shared values, understanding and experiences. They create reasons to return that go beyond the immediate transaction. And over time, strong relationships create something much more valuable.
Customers who stay longer. Who recommend you to others. Who are more forgiving when things go wrong. Who cost less to keep, and may even be willing to pay more because they value the relationship. They’ve got your back.
And of course those benefits compound over time. Greater loyalty, stronger margins and network effects that make the business harder to displace.
Anyone can sell someone a bad product once. Getting them to come back is actually the hard part.
There is, of course, an exception to this. When customers have no meaningful choice ie with monopolies or captive markets. Often with essential services like water or energy where switching can be impossible or very difficult.
Which is why businesses can keep offering poor experiences, when customers have nowhere else to go. It turns out that the freedom to leave is one of the most powerful forms of customer control.
And personal AI agents could make that freedom considerably more practical.
Marketing is going to have to change
For years, digital transformation has largely meant helping businesses become better at serving customers through their own channels.
Better websites. Better apps. Better personalisation. Better conversion rates.
But what happens when the customer brings the channel? What happens when the business no longer controls the interface?
I think the competitive advantage shifts towards three things.
Values. What does your business actually stand for? Not what your marketing department says, but what customers can observe through what you do.
Experiences. How do people feel when they encounter your products, services and people? What memorable experiences can you create before, during and after the sale?
Understanding. How well do you understand what customers are really trying to achieve? Can you help them accomplish something meaningful, even when their journey extends beyond your own products?
But all this will be incredibly hard for most companies. Because they have traditionally been organised inside out. Offering customer experiences around what they sell. Not what customers need.
You see, customers actually organise their lives around what they’re trying to do.
An airline sells flights. A customer wants to attend a wedding. A bank sells mortgages. A customer wants to build a home. An insurance company sells policies. A customer wants peace of mind.
Those are not the same things.
Personal agents will increasingly organise experiences around customer outcomes, rather than the products and categories businesses have created.
But there’s another implication: Marketing itself may have to move beyond the transaction.
If agents increasingly handle discovery, comparison, negotiation and purchasing, brands will need to create emotional connections elsewhere.
But where? Maybe through community. Entertainment. Education. Physical experiences. Generosity. Cultural relevance. Through doing things that people actually care about. Not simply telling customers what they stand for.
Helping people feel it.
Because when your digital experience becomes invisible, your real-world experience becomes more important.
The moment that matters
We’re spending an extraordinary amount of energy debating how AI agents will make purchases. Who initiates the payment? Who authorises the transaction? Who owns the checkout? Important questions, certainly.
But they’re only a small part of the story.
The much bigger shift is that customers are gaining control of the interface through which they interact with the world. They can speak directly to one business. They can bring multiple businesses into a single experience.
Or they can delegate the interaction entirely.
And that changes what it means to have a customer relationship.
For some businesses, the future will be about becoming the most efficient provider of a product or service. For others, it will be about creating relationships that customers actively want to maintain.
Both are reasonable strategies. But only one gives customers a reason to care who they’re dealing with.
And that brings us back to the question of how people remember being made to feel. When customers have their own interface, brands might lose the opportunity to shape every interaction. But they don’t lose responsibility for the experience.
In fact, the experience may become the only thing that differentiates them.
The greatest risk for brands in the agentic era isn’t becoming digitally invisible.
It’s becoming emotionally invisible.
And if your customers no longer need to visit your website, use your app or speak to your people, perhaps this becomes the most important question of all:
How will you make them feel?
Thanks for reading this week’s newsletter.
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