Your Personal Agent is going to augment and automate your life... but what happens when it becomes autonomous?
Digital 'PAs' will become the beating heart of digital empowerment - Getting Things Done for digital customers
Hi everyone,
Thanks for coming back to Customer Futures. Each week I unpack the fundamental shifts around Empowerment Tech. Digital wallets, Personal AI and new digital customer relationships.
This is a PERSPECTIVE edition, a regular take on the future of digital customer relationships.
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In a recent post, I wrote about the trio of ‘Empowerment Tech’ capabilities:
Digital Wallets - THE WHAT
Personal Data Vaults - THE WHERE
Personal Agents - THE WHY
We looked at each, and how together they form a family of digital tools that start and end on the side of the customer.
In this post, we’ll go deeper into Personal Agents. Not just how they are a magical complement to Digital Wallets and Personal Data Vaults. But describe more fully the kinds of things that Digital Personal Agents will do.
We’ll see that they will be the beating heart of digital empowerment. Getting Things Done for digital customers.
I recently chatted with the excellent Joel Miller from ExoBrain, his new AI consultancy. He talked about how AI will have three modes:
Augmentation - helping us extend and improve what we can already do today
Automation - doing things so we don’t have to
Autonomous - doing things independently on our behalf
I like this way of thinking about it. Not least because we can look at Personal Agents - ‘PAs’, working for the individual rather than the business - the same way.
I’ve started to list some of the ways PAs will behave, why they’ll be useful, and how they will feel. It’s certainly not exhaustive, but I hope will start to bring them to life.
In a few short years, I believe we’ll soon feel lost without our digital PAs, our new Personal Agents.
Personal Agent ‘Augmentation’
The first thing Personal Agents will do is augment us. They will extend us. Helping us get better at things, like making decisions, staying on top of our digital lives, and becoming more efficient.
Here are some examples of how PAs will feel, and what they can do.
PAs will recommend
My PA will be personal to me, and understand my preferences. It will help me make better decisions using much smarter inputs. For example, mixing together personal insights from my own purchases (e.g. you’ll like this author), expert suggestions (e.g. published book club lists), and digital product insights (e.g. people who bought this book bought this one).
I’ll be able to mix and match those inputs, and my PA will learn the right way to recommend things to me.
While some people will want fine-tuned controls over the recommendations (a list of the cheapest vs. fastest to arrive vs. most popular), many will just want the answer. ‘Just Buy This One’.
PAs will prompt
Not only will my Personal Agent suggest products and services, but it will prompt the ‘Next Best Action’.
“I see you have a new verified address. Would you like to securely share this information with the 27 businesses who have asked for it before? You can ignore these 31 companies as you have not been interacting with them for over 2 years, or they were a one-off purchase needing delivery”.
PAs will queue
Personal Agents will handle much of the ‘inbound’ stuff you get every day. Just think about all the emails, SMS, WhatsApps and messages you get on social media. Missed calls. Calendar invites. All the accounts that need to be updated.
Much of it needs you to respond with information, or a payment or whatever.
My PA will queue up all the requests, prioritise them, prepare responses, and where needed, ask you to approve. This isn’t crazy futuristic stuff. It’s really just about giving my personal, private PA access to my information and message streams. Asking it to make sense of my data flows, and then only show me what’s needed and when.
PAs will sync
Personal Agents will be able to sync your data across devices and services. Meaning you can always access what you need, when and where you need it.
Some data can stay on your device, like your digital ID. Some things can be moved to your Personal Vault, like your music streaming history (see the recent post on that).
And some data should really live elsewhere. For example, an MRI scan. Yes, you need to manage permissions to access those kinds of files, but you don’t need to carry them around with you on your mobile.
By syncing your data across devices and contexts, your PA will also be able to handle data back-ups too. Handy.
PAs will analyse
Finding patterns, root causes and themes across your digital life. Things you can’t see. Your PA will be able to make sense of your data in ways you can’t. And because you’ll control the personal data inputs and rules (perhaps from a Personal Vault or ‘Decentralised Web Node’), you’ll be able to trust the insights.
The best bit? Because you trust it, you’ll likely share more data with your PA.
This is precisely what the large tech companies will struggle with. To get permission to access more and more of your personal data, to feed their AI models.
Would you use Amazon or Microsoft for your back catalogue of payments and health transactions? Maybe. But it becomes about digital trust - and business model - fast.
There’s much more to say about ‘augmentation’ another time, but this gives you a feel for it. Helping us get smarter, faster, better.
But what about getting PAs to do things?
Personal Agent ‘Automation’
Personal Agents will also be able to complete tasks in the background, so I don’t have to.
Here are some examples.
PAs will follow my rules
Businesses have had automation for years, using platforms like CRM. But on the customer side, it’s been woeful.
If you’re determined, you can use services like Zapier and IFTTT. But they are still clunky and limited to certain data sets.
Personal Agents will take this to the next level.
“Just check me onto my flight”. Or perhaps “Every time I buy a coffee, drop $1 into my pension”. And your PA will automatically claim compensation every time your train or flight is late.
Once people start using PAs, businesses will publish simple steps for PAs to follow, to interact with specific business processes (“We’ll ask you for A, you respond with B, and then we can send you C”). Your PA will be able to follow those instructions, while representing your side of things, as a customer.
Sometimes the PA will need to negotiate a different set of steps. And sometimes those steps will be standardised (like opening a bank account). The point is that it can be automated.
These customer-side automation capabilities alone will unlock a new $bn market for the next wave of digital transformation.
PAs will minimise
When my Personal Agent does respond to a request, where possible it will also be able to minimise the data it sends back. Why send a date of birth when it can respond with an age? And why send an age when you can send back a ‘Y’ or ‘N’ indicating ‘Over 21’.
Of course, the business side needs to be able to request - and make sense of - those minimised requests. But there’s good news there: they’ll have AI doing that for them too.
The point? We can minimise what data is shared, and therefore what is stored within businesses. Vastly reducing the business’s costs to clean, secure, insure and maintain the data. Not to mention the compliance benefits.
PAs will audit
Agents will quietly and precisely keep an auditable record of who asked for what. What was sent, to whom and when.
These records won’t become a data lake for the advertising groups to go swimming in. Rather, they will be about building digital confidence and managing liability. And perhaps most importantly, so we the customers can ‘undo’ tasks when things go wrong (which they will).
PAs will connect
Web2 platforms help us connect our digital services. Uber and Spotify. Facebook and Shopify. But we can’t remember what’s connected to what. Which company gets to access what, when, for how long and why. Instead, Personal Agents will connect me securely, peer-to-peer, to the people, digital services and businesses that I need.
PAs will disconnect, too
Here’s the kicker. Those private connections will last only as long as each party wishes them to. Meaning that the customer (or business for that matter) can turn it off whenever they want. The General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) enshrined eight rights for individuals. I believe that digital PA will give customers a new capability that they didn’t have before… a new 9th right: The Right To Disconnect.
Today, once a business has my email or phone number, they can contact me whenever they want. With PAs, not only can I screen those companies out (for example with queueing, see above) but by disconnecting those companies completely. Now that’s data protection.
Good luck shoving another consent screen in front of me, and then quietly tapping up my data for the next 180 days or whenever.
Holy Digital Transformation batman.
When you remember that we’ve spent billions of dollars digitising the business side of the market… then just wait until you see what’s possible when we digitise the customer side.
Still, this is only half the story. There’s more.
What happens when our Personal Agents can act on our behalf elsewhere, with others?
Personal Agents that are ‘Autonomous’
Our PAs can soon be given a task to do - a defined outcome - and they’ll go and get it done.
Ordering pizza. Setting up meetings. Booking hotels. Renewing your insurance policy.
It looks likely that GPT5 will have autonomous agent features, and you can bet Microsoft’s recent move into ‘Consumer AI’ will have autonomy baked in.
Your PA will be able to represent you digitally, with your profile, preferences and needs, and act on your behalf. Of course, the PA is going to need to be able to prove that it’s acting for you, with consent and so on. But more on that soon (cough digital wallets cough).
For now, I just want to point to one major ‘autonomous’ feature: broadcasting.
PAs will broadcast
I will use my PA to find the things I want online, and get what I need. It will interact, on its own, on my behalf.
My Personal Agent will ask me questions, and map my preferences. It might first recommend things I should consider (see the section on ‘Augmention’ above). And then we’ll agree on the spec of what I need, the price/ size/ delivery/ brand etc.
It will also define a ‘minimum profile’ needed to engage businesses and brands. (Remember, the business doesn’t need to know who you are, just that you’re a verified buyer).
Armed with all the right info, my digital PA will then be able to ‘broadcast’ my needs to the market.
Sound odd? Well, businesses already do this today. They send out ‘RFPs’ (Requests For Proposals) all the time, for other companies to respond back with information and offers.
And so our PAs will handle ‘Personal RFPs’ on our behalf. Doc Searls wrote about this idea in ‘The Intention Economy’ back in 2015. Please go and read it. It’s an idea whose time has come.
My ‘buying signals’ will reach brands in three ways:
Via other AI agents. Platforms and software whose only job is to connect people (demand) to brands (supply). These will be new AI connection bots that are dedicated to helping businesses find customers (see the recent Customer Futures post on that).
Via trusted marketplaces. My PA will be connected to specific dynamic marketplaces that can find what I need. A bit like today’s high-frequency trading platforms that moderate ads, but instead they will trade and manage anonymous needs and corresponding offers. Today’s existing online marketplaces will evolve to accept - and respond to - your digital Personal Agent.
Via direct connections to companies. Once you understand the power of private, personal digital connections, you’ll see that My Personal Agent will already be linked, privately and securely, to the businesses I already deal with. So my PA will be able to pump my needs directly into the company’s existing marketing machines and CRM tools. Those brands will be able to respond directly to me with an offer. PA-to-CRM integrations are already being built in the market.
A mini side note. Look at that last point above. Businesses will respond with an ‘offer’.
With these three models in place above, powered by our digital PAs, digital advertising is about to be turned on its head.
Today, businesses spray ads out, hoping for ‘relevance’ and ‘engagement’. But it’s all guesswork. And is why the response rate to digital ads is less than 4%.
But here’s the thing: digital ads won’t be ads any more. They’ll be offers. Sent directly to my Personal Agent, in response to a verified request from me. And depending on the context, my PA will either respond directly (see Automation), or present me with a summary of the options, with a recommendation (see Augmentation).
There’s so much more to be written about autonomous Personal Agents. But for now just understand that AI autonomy is going to completely change how we spend time online. How we interact.
And that it will completely disrupt customer engagement as we know it.
Personal Agents will empower
Personal Assistants. Personal Agents. Agent AI. Whatever we call them, these new digital tools will augment, automate and act autonomously. And they’ll do so from the customer side.
They will empower us. Perhaps for the first time, we’ll finally be able to participate fully in the digital economy.
Independently. Privately. Securely.
Traditionally, a ‘PA’ - literally a ‘Personal Assistant’ - would take notes, help you manage your diary, and keep you organised. Someone to deal with things around you so that you can focus on the main job.
Within the next 5 years your new digital PA, your Personal Agent, is going to run whole parts of your life. And the implications are going to be staggering.
We must think carefully about how we design and use these new powerful digital assistants. They’ll need to know lots about us. More than we know about ourselves.
So as our digital PAs augment and automate our lives, and as they increasingly act on our behalf, we’ll need to keep a close eye on how they work. Who runs them. And with what business model.
I’ll say it again: The issue with AI won’t be digital privacy. It’s going to be digital intimacy.
I hope you can see now that Personal Agents will become a magical complement to Digital Wallets and Personal Data Vaults. Getting Things Done for digital customers.
Overall, I’m excited. Because in my view, Personal Agents will become the beating heart of customer digital empowerment.
And our digital PAs will become the very definition of what it means to be a digital customer.
Thanks for reading this week’s edition.
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