Hi everyone, thanks for coming back to Customer Futures.
Each week I unpack the disruptive shifts around Empowerment Tech. AI Agents, digital wallets, Personal AI in and the future of the digital customer relationship.
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Hi folks,
This week I want to explore a simple idea that has been bouncing around my head for a while.
It’s a bit of a longer read this one, because what’s coming is fundamental to the digital economy. It’s about what I believe will happen with AI and AI agents.
Or more specifically, how.
We humans are not particularly good at predicting disruption. What will actually change. Not because we lack imagination, but because we always assume new tech will disrupt the products and services we use today.
The stuff we can already see.
But history reminds us that we usually fail to see the bigger shift coming, the unexpected twist. And it never ends up the way we think.
So today we’re going to dive into:
We always predict the obvious disruption
A missing ‘middle step’
We’re making the same mistake with AI
AI’s middle step will be ‘TRINCO’
Exciting new possibilities
Stop looking for the taxi driver
Let’s Go.
We always predict the obvious disruption
If you’d asked people in 1997 what the web was going to change most, newspapers would have been near the top of the list.
It was pretty obvious.
Publishing online was going to become much cheaper than printing millions of newspapers every day. All the costs of loading them onto lorries would disappear, along with delivering them overnight and hoping people would buy them the next morning.
The obvious disruption that folks saw was faster, cheaper digital distribution.
But it wasn’t just distribution. Because the newspaper industry wasn’t just built around printing presses and lorries. It was built around owning attention, and who controlled the discovery of news.
‘The News’ no longer arrived on your doorstep, but rather through exciting new chat rooms and ‘weblogs’ (now just ‘blogs’), then RSS feeds, then search, then Facebook and YouTube, then X and podcasts, and now TikTok and beyond.
Today, millions of young people consume most of their news without ever opening a newspaper’s homepage.
The stats of the shift are remarkable. In just over 10 years, UK weekly newspaper reach collapsed from 59% in 2013 to just 12% in 2025.
And today, 60% of people now use social media to get their news. In fact, in 2024 82% of 16–24-year-olds got their news through social media.
So the disruption to newspapers hasn’t just been ‘digital publishing’. It’s now a completely new model for discovery.
The same thing happened to music. In the early 2000s, the web looked like a better way to buy CDs. ‘An infinite shelf’ at Amazon, as Jeff Bezos described it.
Then slowly the web became a way to download MP3s and other media. But both ordering CDs and downloading music were basically just digital versions of music’s existing business model.
Same album. Different formats.
But then broadband beefed up, people got better laptops, and streaming became possible. And the economics of the entire music industry changed.
I love Ben Evans’ take on what’s happened to the music industry over the last 20 years. The question has shifted from “Should I spend £15 buying this album?” to “Should I spend £15 every month to access almost every song ever recorded?”
Streaming changed the game.
A missing middle step
What everyone missed in their early predictions was a critical ‘middle step’.
Uber is a good example.
Nobody saw the internet in 1997 and concluded that taxi companies were about to go out of business. That would have sounded ridiculous. Taxis didn’t run on websites.
But then the internet became mobile. Phones became location-aware. Payments became digital. And at the same time, reputation systems made it easier for strangers to trust and transact with each other.
Combined, these things became a new ‘middle step’ for the web. A fundamental transition for digital. And a whole bunch of new consumer features showed up that simply hadn’t existed in the ‘desktop internet’.
Around 2011, some folks gave this middle step a name.
Social. Local. Mobile.
And new generation of apps started riding the wave of ‘SO-LO-MO’.
Instagram was overwhelmingly Social + Mobile. Foursquare (remember that?) was a combination of Social + Local + Mobile. Uber was Local + Mobile, with networked identity and reputation tools so that strangers could trust each other.
My point is that the major tech disruption wasn’t just ‘the web’. It was the ‘mobile internet’. And a whole new set of building blocks for digital services.
The middle step of ‘SO-LO-MO’ triggered the next generation of apps. And those became the real disruption.
It’s why the impact of tech is so difficult to predict. We spend so much of our time looking at today’s products and services, while completely missing tomorrow’s building blocks.
We can’t always see the middle step that’s coming.
We’re making the same mistake with AI
Today, almost every AI conversation is about digital automation.
Which jobs disappear? Which repetitive tasks get delegated? How much customer service can AI handle? How much analysis and paperwork can AI complete?
Those are good questions, but they’re also obvious questions. They’re like asking about newspapers publishing on the web. As always, we’re talking about using a new technology (e.g. AI agents) to do the old thing better and cheaper and faster (e.g. customer services).
But history reminds us that the much bigger opportunity comes after the middle step arrives. When the tech gets some entirely new capabilities, and creates markets that didn’t exist before.
So the better question today isn’t “What will AI automate?” It’s about looking for the middle step. Asking “What is AI’s equivalent of SO-LO-MO?”
I think we’re beginning to see the answer.
AI’s middle step will be ‘TRINCO’
What’s today’s AI equivalent of SO-LO-MO?
I think it’s Trusted, Intelligent and Contextual. Let’s call it ‘TR-IN-CO’.
TRINCO.
Three capabilities that are emerging independently right now, but become hugely more powerful when they get combined.
Which is very soon indeed.
TRUSTED AI
For the last decade, most ‘digital trust’ conversations have focused on proving who someone is. KYC. Identity verification. High assurance. And with AI, we’re now excited about ‘KYA’. Know Your Agent.
What is what, who is who. How liability works when we can bind an AI action to a person or organisation. Yes, that matters. Deeply. But it’s fast becoming table stakes.
Because AI is now better at proving that it’s a person, than we are as humans. AI tools can already solve CAPTCHA puzzles, and produce deep-fake ID documents and liveness checks in seconds.
On the other hand, I can’t remember my passwords, routinely fail CAPTCHA, and I’m forced to use SMS as a second factor for some services. Bleurgh.
AI is now better at digital ID than I am.
But let’s go further. AI trust needs to be way more than checking an ID and KYA. It also need to include digital reputation, the commercial model of the AI service, if and how it is compliant with the regulations, its privacy policies and operations, if it has been peer reviewed, if it’s open source and so on.
Without trust, every AI platform, every AI agent, every credential and every piece of information becomes suspect. It’s why all my digital interactions are now guilty until proven innocent.
Why does this matter? Because once trust exists, something much more interesting happens.
INTELLIGENT AI
Of course, this is the tech excitement du jour.
Everyone is already obsessed with intelligence. LLMs, SLMs, RAG, cloud, government, sovereign, private, public, weighted, open, closed, biased, ethical, all the rest of it.
Just this week, Zuckerberg published his latest mega thesis for ‘personal super-intelligence’. And last time I checked, BigTech was spending $800Bn EVERY YEAR building the intelligence layer out.
It’s the smart stuff. The Reasoning. The Planning. The Acting. The Learning.
BUT.
While the AI models are all improving at an astonishing pace, intelligence on its own isn’t enough.
An intelligent agent with no trusted identity or reputation, no governance, no compliance and no meaningful context, isn’t particularly useful.
Which brings us to the third ingredient for AI’s middle step.
CONTEXTUAL AI
This is the part that’s massively underestimated.
Context means your current status and environment, your preferences, your previous decisions, your credentials, subscriptions, location, permissions and much more. Including of course your intent.
It’s your digital context that allows an AI agent to understand your situation and act appropriately on your behalf.
And that’s where digital wallets, portable data - this new category of ‘Empowerment Tech’ - become waaaay more interesting. Because digital wallets were never just about identity and trust.
They’re about portability. Meaning we can feed smart, rich and permissioned context to our Personal AIs too.
These three capabilities - Trusted AI, Intelligent AI, Contextual AI - are combining at an incredible rate. Compounding on each other.
TRINCO.
And together they are creating a new, transformational ‘middle step’ for AI. Just like the mobile device did for the web.
Exciting new possibilities
Just like SO-LO-MO unleashed the next wave of digital services, I’m seeing all the signs that TRINCO will do the same for AI.
Just think about energy switching for a moment.
Today, comparison websites help you discover offers. Tomorrow, your trusted agent will continuously monitor your actual energy usage, understand your preferences and values, discover new offers, negotiate with suppliers, prove it has authority to represent you, and execute a switch on your behalf.
TRINCO in a box.
But we can go further.
When your agent coordinates with hundreds of other community agents representing verified households in your area, and collectively negotiating a better deal at scale.
Funnily enough, group switching like this is already in place in the UK with Martin Lewis’ ‘Cheap Energy Club’… but right now it’s all manual. It’s run by humans.
Soon, we can automate those huge community deals with verified AI agents, and energy switching just got dialled up to 11. And who knows what happens after that.
Or take another juicy use case, one of my favourites. Insurance renewals.
Instead of filling in broadly the same forms every year, an agent will understand what you own, what has changed in your life, where you’re over-insured, where you’re under-insured, what risks actually matter to you, and which policies have conditions that don’t fit your behaviour.
Your agents will continuously scan the market, negotiate and return with recommendations you can approve. (Notice by the way I used the plural for agents. You’ll likely have hundreds of them).
My point is that most folks are still missing what’s coming. They’re often just getting excited because their annual insurance form gets completed faster.
But the real shift - after the TRINCO ‘middle step’ - is that a completely new participant, the customer, has just entered the market.
And they have trusted, intelligent context on their side too.
Stop looking for the taxi driver
And that’s the thing with trying to predict what’s going to happen.
We’re looking for the equivalent of the taxi driver. Which task gets automated? Which job disappears? Which workflow gets 30% more efficient?
But Uber didn’t automate driving.
It changed another part of the value chain. Discovery, dispatch, booking, trust and payment. And once that layer changed, the economics and structure of the whole taxi market changed with it.
TRINCO will do something similar to AI. And across thousands of markets, especially for B2C players.
The internet gave us the infrastructure. SO-LO-MO was a middle step that changed what could be built with it. And then came the companies we couldn’t previously see.
Insta, Uber, SnapChat and the rest.
I suspect we’re now approaching a similar moment with AI. While we’re still talking about automating tasks, underneath that conversation, a whole other set of agentic capabilities are bubbling up.
Trusted. Intelligent. Contextual.
TRINCO.
And just as the combination of Social, Local and Mobile helped unlock an entirely new generation of digital businesses, TRINCO will do the same for AI and agents.
If that’s right, trying to predict which of today’s jobs AI will automate is missing the much bigger story. We’re looking for the taxi driver. But we should really be looking for the smartphone.
The ‘mobile internet’ moment for AI.
I think it’s coming fast, and we’ll soon have new Trusted, Intelligent, Contextual AI tools in our pocket.
And folks won’t see it coming.
And that’s a wrap. Stay tuned for more Customer Futures soon, both here and over at LinkedIn.
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Trinco is a perfect acronym. 👌🏼