I don’t want a design agency, I want to design agency.
Recently, I’ve had some thought-provoking conversations about reintermediation. Well, I say that, but none of the conversations started with this. Most started with the messy world that the last decade of disintermediation created.
The World we all live in has had every last drop of the business ‘in the middle’ squeezed out of it. Which was done, ostensibly as a way to create greater accessibility and more even distribution of goods and services. But an unintended (or intended) consequence of this ‘Ubererization’ is the transference of the cost of business to the end user.
Through OTT TV services the end user is expected to become the programmer. Through the disintermediation of travel, hotels, and exchanges the end user is expected to build itineraries, book rooms, pay cleaners, work out connections, and have all the advantages of local knowledge. Through the destruction of local businesses, the end user is expected to become an expert or seek collective wisdom on all aspects of every consumer good.
Through disintermediation, we measure, diagnose, train, educate, plan, invest, program, mentor, and curate. We have become chefs, directors, educators, reviewers, chauffeurs, fabricators, manufacturers, technicians, and engineers of our destinies.
At some level, this kind of control could be seen as a positive thing, but at scale, it becomes unmanageable, not to mention the gaps it creates for those who require greater accessibility.
The last dollar saved in the disintermediation playbook was recruiting the end user to work for free and it’s having an impact;
Over 80% of parents now experience excess stress due to changes in daily routines and the pandemic has only exacerbated this unpredictability source, 46% of US viewers say the number of video streaming services makes it tougher to find the shows they’re interested in, source.
But I’m reminded of what Peter Diamandis, founder of the XPrize and Singularity University likes to say, “The best way to become a billionaire is to solve a billion-person problem.” Disintermediation has created a billion-person problem. It places the largest stress on those people who are most unable to spare time, Families.
So, how do we begin to fix it?
Kwame Nyanning had some prescient thinking on how UX design has to evolve. In his thesis which he entitles Agentic UX, the role of experience design is to build systems to express agency or control on behalf of another. It uses Applied AI to manage the debt that disintermediation creates. We all want agency but don’t want the task of being the agent. Or as Kwame beautifully put it — ‘Agents allow us to bestow control onto them so we can focus on deciding how we want to interact with the results of our intentions, instead of having to manipulate the systems that manufacture those results.’
The AI Agent becomes the intermediary, or proxy of your wishes, tastes, and actions. As this evolves, and as every contributor to the system engages an agent, AI Agents will invariably be talking to another AI Agent to negotiate an outcome. Greg Johnson and I have worked under such a thesis since we collaborated on StitchFix. Then at Condé Nast and finally at Yohana. Agent-based interactions are real, and valuable, and bring up many thorny questions.
Whether or not you agree with Kwame Nyanning’s thesis, industry is already rethinking the building blocks of commercial relationships. Contracts, payments, royalties, scheduling, preferences, advertising, data, and tracking are all being questioned as are the businesses built upon those building blocks. It also brings up massive questions about bias, discrimination, power and equity, accessibility, and moral choices and asks a lot of AI models that have trained on passed biases and assumptions. But AI is already shifting away from static models toward being more active, effective, and creative.
What is evidently clear, is that the material of AI is us. Allowing access to personal decisions will only train better, more diverse models. But with access comes responsibility. I have seen that people are willing to share very personal information for the reward of time saved but they demand absolute discretion and ownership of that information. We’re not yet close to the ‘universal profile’ that negotiates the World around us, but the technology might already be there.
6 consequences of thinking about the materialization of the personal agent.
Contracts will become a continual negotiation. Why do we sign a phone contract, when all we want is to have the data, access, content, and signal that we want when we want it? If an agent offered you continuous phone access at the fastest speeds and cheapest price no matter where you are, would you want it? If the agent signs the contract, then it can renegotiate the contract at any time — which ends the nightmare of plan choice and plan retirement and leads to multi-brand contracts that cover you anywhere.
Royalties on everything. Sharing any information comes at a price. That information becomes a building block in someone else’s business. Whether it’s demographic, psychographic, transactional, or preference, everything we do is being monetized. It’s also the fuel that trains AI. A personal agent could meter what is shared with whom. It could track how that information is being used and its financial value. An attribution matrix similar to scientific citation, but for any type of information?
The rise of the P(D)C. If we delegate personal decisions to a personal agent we will need a Personal Data Center. Our information is currently distributed among the sites, devices, and applications we use each day. For personal agents to become a reality we need a single centralized digital twin. But with centralization comes risk. To leverage knowledge, an agent has to have information. This contradiction is the central thesis of quantum encryption. In quantum cryptography, an agent doesn’t need to decrypt information in order to receive it. Any eavesdropper trying to read the data transfer alters the state by viewing it, which introduces error. The challenge to adopting quantum cryptography is that cybersecurity infrastructure takes an arduous amount of time to upgrade, but personal cybersecurity has none of those challenges, could the end user be the early adopter of quantum cryptography?
Becoming our multiple selves. We all have multiple personas. Our work selves, our family selves, our college friends selves. Then there are the selves we share on social media and the real selves we see in the mirror. For any personal agent to make decisions they will have to navigate the versions of our selves and make decisions that don’t cause conflict. And, if we can build an interface to help pull all the facets of the self into a single place it would not only help an agent but also be a profound psychological tool.
Navigating Conditional Choices. None of us are an island. It’s easy to model out a scenario where the World is organized around your personal taste, I’ve done it. But in reality, decisions are conditional upon others. Whether family, friends, or colleagues, each choice is in fact a string of choices that incorporate the personal tastes and opinions of others. This introduces the complexity of managing the multiple selves in multiple contexts with multiple decision-makers. Family UX is not yet a discipline, but anyone working in multi-sided marketplaces understands the tradeoffs of conditional choices. If we’re designing a World where experiences become better rather than more and more compromised, we must design for the challenges brought about by all kinds of families.
Addressing Asymmetry of Access. No conversation about a personal agent can begin without addressing those who will ultimately lack a personal agent. Even now, we don’t all have the same decision-making power, and if the control of all decisions of the future requires an agent that costs money then that disparity will only increase.
This brings about an interesting question, should an agent be an object awarded to every citizen? Governments already offer passports, which grant access to travel — so is an agent a passport for virtual travel? Would we want a Government-issued agent? The role of Government means many different things to many different people, so this is contentious. But in essence, an agent is a governance system. So an agent could replace the Government, and become a democratic system to negotiate all large decisions based on the needs of all personal preference. Well, there’s something to think about.