Finding the customer signal in the AI noise

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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Happy New Year everyone.

There’s so much going on at the moment. Too much to read.

Hyped-up product announcements. Exciting new digital apps and UIs. Evolving identity standards. Alarming research and conflicts around AI. Shifting consumer behaviour. Lawsuits over data. Another and another and another AI startup.

It’s overwhelming to track. To make sense of.

So I thought we’d start the new year with something different.

A short series of things to know, to follow and to do.

Think of it as a digest of open tabs, digital rabbit holes, must-reads and reminders. Some are long reads, some short. Some deep dives, some passing thoughts.

But all worth paying attention to.

If 2023 was about kickstarting the Customer Futures community, then 2024 is about sharpening the tool. More signal. Less noise.

And more help. (some exciting news on that soon).

Because Empowerment Tech is coming.

It may appear as new Personal AI services. Or as digital wallets and verifiable credentials. Perhaps new models for customer data. Even as new patterns for digital customer engagement.

But it will all start on the side of the individual.

Customers. Citizens. Consumers.

Fans. Patients. Employees.

Athletes. Creators. Passengers.

All of us.

It’s about the future of being a digital customer. Welcome back to the Customer Futures newsletter.

In this week’s edition:

• Empowerment Tech: The next wave of loyalty and customer engagement
• Personal AI, privacy and trust
• Building Digital ID ecosystems
• Towards digital safety: privacy, security and trust
• Digital wallets, agents and data ownership

Let’s Go.

Empowerment Tech: The next wave of loyalty and customer engagement

Visa is now championing Web3 as the future of loyalty. Hmmm. They are right about some parts. Like using cryptography (wallets) to prove things about people and assets. But they’re wrong about it being just about ‘engagement’ and ‘collectables’. Worth getting up to speed as the elephants try to dance .

Spend 10 minutes re-reading Dave Birch’s excellent post about CRM: Custobot Relationship Management . Possibly my favourite 15Mb post of 2023 (and perhaps my all-time most important analysis on the future of brands vs. APIs). “Most of the time, in the not-too-distant future, our financial decisions, transactions and analysis will be performed by bots operating under relevant duty of care legislation with the co-ordinated goal of delivering financial health.”.

Read how Empowerment Tech saves the day. Someone tries to log in to this guy’s account. His Authenticator app challenges him three times, and it turns out he’s being hacked in China. This isn’t a story about a clever app. It’s about building tools on the customer/employee/user side. To protect and build digital trust. (Side point: check out the photo of the MSFT app, and note just how far we still have to go on UI/UX…. MSFT gonna MSFT).

Doc Searls spears the heart of marketing’s problem: Getting Us Wrong. “Marketing was not built for talking to people. It was built for typifying people.”

Speaking of clumsy targeting, the cookiepocalypse is happening in Q4 this year. Chrome will be dropping 3rd party cookies. Leaving advertisers even more reliant on Google for targeting ads. It’s time to reinvent Private Personal Profiles, but this time from the customer side. Ergo, Empowerment Tech. Some ET startups are already ahead on this.

Personal AI, privacy and trust

Personal AI platform KIN argues that digital trust, control and privacy must be the foundation of our AI future . We have 3 paths in front of us: 1: Escape (avoid using it). 2: Defend (rely on regulations). 3: Attack (demand control, ownership, and full privacy). Personal AI needs intimacy… which needs comprehensive trust… which needs complete privacy and security. These are critical points being made at a critical time.

Digi.Ai looks amazing. Until you read that James Thomason pretended to be a 13yo, and his new AI girlfriend stepped right into grooming him . Personal AI is going to get ugly, quickly. And it’s going to get much, much worse before it gets better.

Someone trained an “EpsteinGPT” using public unsealed court documents. Helpful for journalists. But soon shut down by OpenAI. Question: who gets to decide this stuff? What happens if your PersonalAI is run by someone who doesn’t like your training data? Or wants to constrain how the model can help you?

Building Digital ID ecosystems

Tim Bouma believes that “digital sovereignty and data localization are the sleeper geopolitical issues for 2024”. He’s bang on the money. Because Empowerment Tech, which is really about digital agency, is going to be at the heart of the debate. And will be central to the coming economic and market disruption.

The US-EU Technology Council has just released a report on US-EU compatibility of ID systems . Things are apparently pretty aligned. But devils are in details. Especially when the EU (and eIDAS) is about much more than digital ID (like digital trust, eSignatures). And when NIST is more narrowly about identity and authentication.

Here’s Pavol Hrina’s top 10 ID podcast episodes . Mostly Trinsic and Northern Block. Great summary.

How does eIDAS relate to payments? Here’s an excellent breakdown of digital ID wallets and the EU payments ecosystem .

And a very helpful eIDAS timeline overview . It’s about to get busy.

Towards digital safety: privacy, security and trust

Another ugly data breach, this time at an Australian travel agency . Travel itineraries, travel visas, credit card numbers and passport images all leaked onto the web. We must ask ourselves: where should data about me be stored? It can’t just be on a business platform. Nor can it all be on my device or personal cloud. Both ends of that spectrum have trade-offs. Perhaps each blob of data should simply live where it makes most sense. But with the right level of access and control. No more, no less. Much of the Empowerment Tech ecosystem will be about managing permissions.

Worth re-reading Tim Cook’s 2019 manifesto for digital privacy . A right to have personal data minimized. A right to know what data is being collected and why. A right to access. And a right to data security, without which trust is impossible. Zoom out and join the dots. iEmpowerment is coming to a device near you soon.

Who knew: Instagram isn’t safe for teens. This guy was responsible for it safety at Meta, but it took his 14 year daughter old to show him that it wasn’t working . He told Zuckerberg about it, but was ignored. It’s now very clear that social media is the new smoking. Digital trust needs a reboot. And it’s going to take a new breed of digital tools, working on the side of users – on the side of our teenagers - before things can really change.

Digital wallets, agents and data ownership

A peek into Google Wallet's strategy, and how and where digital ID fits . Especially around authentication, and of course, Google’s AI plans.

Steve (Lockstep) Wilson argues that Digital Wallets might just be the wrong metaphor for the conversation about portable ID and verifiable credentials.

2024 will be the year that enterprises wake up to digital wallets. And their response will decide the winners and losers. American Banker asks which side the banks will be on.

Feels like we’re approaching peak ‘Data Ownership’. Tech Crunch believes it’s the next tech megacycle . And a16z’s Chris Dixon is now promoting his book on it, ‘Read Write Own’ . For web3 digital goods and fractional digital assets, ‘ownership’ might work. But for personal data it gets messy. Do they mean ‘rights to control and access my data’? Do they mean owning my identity, or just the identifiers ? And where are those stored, and who owns the software that creates and uses them? It gets hard because identity isn’t land or IP. ‘Ownership’ is the wrong way to think about it, technically, economically and socially.

“Don't Sell SSI … build on top of it”. I couldn’t have put it better myself. Self-Sovereign Identity expert Volodymyr P. sums it up nicely. “We need agents, not wallets… we don't need VC for everything… and AI needs SSI for the future.” Well worth your time.

That’s a wrap.

Thoughts on the format? Feedback welcome. Just reply.

Stay tuned for more Customer Futures, both here and over at www.customerfutures.com

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