Difference between revisions of "Personal Information Agent"

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==Full Title or Meme==
 
==Full Title or Meme==
 
Support for a personal assistant to help users control access to their personal information.
 
Support for a personal assistant to help users control access to their personal information.
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This digital entity (the PIA) may act as a delegate in some cases, like an auto response unit if the natural person is unavailable.
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==Context==
 
==Context==
 
* The operating assumption on this page is that users want to delegate part of the decisions about releasing the personal data to an agent that operates solely on their behalf.
 
* The operating assumption on this page is that users want to delegate part of the decisions about releasing the personal data to an agent that operates solely on their behalf.
 
* Another assumption is that a large majority of users would not toleration interruptions every time some element of their personal information was accessed.
 
* Another assumption is that a large majority of users would not toleration interruptions every time some element of their personal information was accessed.
 +
* 2024-10-20 [https://www.fintechbrainfood.com/p/ai-agents Consumer AI Agents in Fintech] Simon Taylor
 
* Relationships on the internet are mostly [[Asynchronous]] where users would like to have some privacy, but demand that organization a fully transparent about themselves and the motives in accumulating user personal information. This page is concerned solely with natural persons and their desire to not have all of their personal information on display to all enterprises where they interchange information.
 
* Relationships on the internet are mostly [[Asynchronous]] where users would like to have some privacy, but demand that organization a fully transparent about themselves and the motives in accumulating user personal information. This page is concerned solely with natural persons and their desire to not have all of their personal information on display to all enterprises where they interchange information.
 
* Researchers at Carnegie Mellon University's CyLab Security and Privacy Institute assessed the degree of autonomy that people would feel comfortable giving to personalized privacy assistants (PPAs).<ref>Daniel Tkacik, ''How Much Control Are People Willing to Grant to a Personal Privacy Assistant?'' (2020-06-18) Carnegie Mellon University CyLab Security and Privacy Institute https://orange.hosting.lsoft.com/trk/click?ref=znwrbbrs9_6-25b42x32309fx079946&</ref> The team surveyed users on three increasingly autonomous versions of PPAs; most participants reacted positively to the first version, which would simply let users know that devices were around them, while a few said it would make them anxious. A second version that knows users' personal privacy preferences, and makes recommendations from that information, also found wide favor, while the third PPA, which would exclude users from decision-making entirely, provoked mixed reactions. CyLab's Jessica Colnago said, "We found that people are definitely interested in having some sort of assistance like that provided by a PPA, but what that assistance looks like varies across the board. In different scenarios with different people, they want different ways of interacting with the system.”
 
* Researchers at Carnegie Mellon University's CyLab Security and Privacy Institute assessed the degree of autonomy that people would feel comfortable giving to personalized privacy assistants (PPAs).<ref>Daniel Tkacik, ''How Much Control Are People Willing to Grant to a Personal Privacy Assistant?'' (2020-06-18) Carnegie Mellon University CyLab Security and Privacy Institute https://orange.hosting.lsoft.com/trk/click?ref=znwrbbrs9_6-25b42x32309fx079946&</ref> The team surveyed users on three increasingly autonomous versions of PPAs; most participants reacted positively to the first version, which would simply let users know that devices were around them, while a few said it would make them anxious. A second version that knows users' personal privacy preferences, and makes recommendations from that information, also found wide favor, while the third PPA, which would exclude users from decision-making entirely, provoked mixed reactions. CyLab's Jessica Colnago said, "We found that people are definitely interested in having some sort of assistance like that provided by a PPA, but what that assistance looks like varies across the board. In different scenarios with different people, they want different ways of interacting with the system.”
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  (3) Using SSH agent forwarding - GitHub Enterprise Cloud Docs. https://docs.github.com/en/enterprise-cloud@latest/authentication/connecting-to-github-with-ssh/using-ssh-agent-forwarding.
 
  (3) Using SSH agent forwarding - GitHub Enterprise Cloud Docs. https://docs.github.com/en/enterprise-cloud@latest/authentication/connecting-to-github-with-ssh/using-ssh-agent-forwarding.
 
  (4) GitHub - rnadigital/agentcloud: Agent Cloud is like having your own GPT .... https://github.com/rnadigital/agentcloud.
 
  (4) GitHub - rnadigital/agentcloud: Agent Cloud is like having your own GPT .... https://github.com/rnadigital/agentcloud.
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===Jamie Smith===
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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
 +
 +
Jamie Smith
 +
Mar 21, 2024
 +
 +
This is a PERSPECTIVE edition, a regular take on the future of digital customer relationships.
 +
 +
If you’re reading this and haven’t yet signed up, why not join over two thousand executives, entrepreneurs, designers, regulators and other digital leaders by clicking below. To the regular subscribers, thank you.
 +
 +
In a recent post, I wrote about the trio of ‘Empowerment Tech’ capabilities:
 +
 +
Digital Wallets - THE WHAT
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 +
Personal Data Vaults - THE WHERE
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Personal Agents - THE WHY
 +
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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.
 +
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We’ll see that they will be the beating heart of digital empowerment. Getting Things Done for digital customers.
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I recently chatted with the excellent Joel Miller from ExoBrain, his new AI consultancy. He talked about how AI will have three modes:
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Augmentation - helping us extend and improve what we can already do today
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Automation - doing things so we don’t have to
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Autonomous - doing things independently on our behalf
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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.
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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.
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In a few short years, I believe we’ll soon feel lost without our digital PAs, our new Personal Agents.
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Personal Agent ‘Augmentation’
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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.
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Here are some examples of how PAs will feel, and what they can do.
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PAs will recommend
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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).
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I’ll be able to mix and match those inputs, and my PA will learn the right way to recommend things to me.
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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’.
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PAs will prompt
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Not only will my Personal Agent suggest products and services, but it will prompt the ‘Next Best Action’.
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“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”.
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PAs will queue
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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.
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Much of it needs you to respond with information, or a payment or whatever.
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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.
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PAs will sync
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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.
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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).
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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.
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By syncing your data across devices and contexts, your PA will also be able to handle data back-ups too. Handy.
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PAs will analyse
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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.
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The best bit? Because you trust it, you’ll likely share more data with your PA.
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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.
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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.
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There’s much more to say about ‘augmentation’ another time, but this gives you a feel for it. Helping us get smarter, faster, better.
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But what about getting PAs to do things?
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If you’re enjoying this and want to dig deeper into Empowerment Tech, digital wallets and the future of digital customer engagement, why not sign up:
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Personal Agent ‘Automation’
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Personal Agents will also be able to complete tasks in the background, so I don’t have to.
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Here are some examples.
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PAs will follow my rules
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Businesses have had automation for years, using platforms like CRM. But on the customer side, it’s been woeful.
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If you’re determined, you can use services like Zapier and IFTTT. But they are still clunky and limited to certain data sets.
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Personal Agents will take this to the next level.
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“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.
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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.
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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.
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These customer-side automation capabilities alone will unlock a new $bn market for the next wave of digital transformation.
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PAs will minimise
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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’.
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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.
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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.
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PAs will audit
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Agents will quietly and precisely keep an auditable record of who asked for what. What was sent, to whom and when.
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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).
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PAs will connect
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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.
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PAs will disconnect, too
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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.
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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.
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Good luck shoving another consent screen in front of me, and then quietly tapping up my data for the next 180 days or whenever.
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Holy Digital Transformation batman.
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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.
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Still, this is only half the story. There’s more.
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What happens when our Personal Agents can act on our behalf elsewhere, with others?
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Personal Agents that are ‘Autonomous’
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Our PAs can soon be given a task to do - a defined outcome - and they’ll go and get it done.
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Ordering pizza. Setting up meetings. Booking hotels. Renewing your insurance policy.
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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.
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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).
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For now, I just want to point to one major ‘autonomous’ feature: broadcasting.
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PAs will broadcast
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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.
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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.
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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).
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Armed with all the right info, my digital PA will then be able to ‘broadcast’ my needs to the market.
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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.
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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.
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My ‘buying signals’ will reach brands in three ways:
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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).
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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.
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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.
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A mini side note. Look at that last point above. Businesses will respond with an ‘offer’.
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With these three models in place above, powered by our digital PAs, digital advertising is about to be turned on its head.
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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%.
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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).
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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.
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And that it will completely disrupt customer engagement as we know it.
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Personal Agents will empower
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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.
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They will empower us. Perhaps for the first time, we’ll finally be able to participate fully in the digital economy.
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Independently. Privately. Securely.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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I’ll say it again: The issue with AI won’t be digital privacy. It’s going to be digital intimacy.
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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.
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Overall, I’m excited. Because in my view, Personal Agents will become the beating heart of customer digital empowerment.
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And our digital PAs will become the very definition of what it means to be a digital customer.
  
 
==References==
 
==References==

Latest revision as of 21:10, 15 November 2024

Full Title or Meme

Support for a personal assistant to help users control access to their personal information.

This digital entity (the PIA) may act as a delegate in some cases, like an auto response unit if the natural person is unavailable.

Context

  • The operating assumption on this page is that users want to delegate part of the decisions about releasing the personal data to an agent that operates solely on their behalf.
  • Another assumption is that a large majority of users would not toleration interruptions every time some element of their personal information was accessed.
  • 2024-10-20 Consumer AI Agents in Fintech Simon Taylor
  • Relationships on the internet are mostly Asynchronous where users would like to have some privacy, but demand that organization a fully transparent about themselves and the motives in accumulating user personal information. This page is concerned solely with natural persons and their desire to not have all of their personal information on display to all enterprises where they interchange information.
  • Researchers at Carnegie Mellon University's CyLab Security and Privacy Institute assessed the degree of autonomy that people would feel comfortable giving to personalized privacy assistants (PPAs).[1] The team surveyed users on three increasingly autonomous versions of PPAs; most participants reacted positively to the first version, which would simply let users know that devices were around them, while a few said it would make them anxious. A second version that knows users' personal privacy preferences, and makes recommendations from that information, also found wide favor, while the third PPA, which would exclude users from decision-making entirely, provoked mixed reactions. CyLab's Jessica Colnago said, "We found that people are definitely interested in having some sort of assistance like that provided by a PPA, but what that assistance looks like varies across the board. In different scenarios with different people, they want different ways of interacting with the system.”
  • The Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act of 1996 (HIPAA) Privacy Rule’s right of access provisions require that individuals or their personal representatives have timely access to their health information (within 30 days, with the possibility of one 30-day extension) and for a reasonable, cost-based fee.

Problems

  • Decentralized IDs were created to give user's control of their identifiers, but at the cost of posting those identifiers on a publicly resolvable public ledger. The result is that any usage of the the DID can be correlated with any other use of the same DID. Once sufficient correlations have been accumulated against that DID, the person is uniquely identifiable.
  • Most identifier authentication services on the web now offer a Service Endpoint that can provide information about the identifier. If the user is hosting their identifier on there smartphone, no service endpoint on that phone could be always available for query.
  • Nearly all of the privacy solution require users to keep separate track of identifiers used in public and private settings. This is not likely to be acceptable to the majority of users if we don't also give them a User Agent that can track all of their relationships and the identifier that they use for that relationship.

Solutions

Any solution that met the context described above would need to have an agent that was responsible to, and trusted by, the person that owned the personal data.

Personal Smartphone Agent

Web based Agent

Also tracked in this wiki as a Personal Cloud Store (qv).

Personal Artificial Intelligence agent

Can a smaller language model with significantly less parametric memory emulate such emergent ability of these larger language models? The Berkeley Artificial Intelligence Research "goal is to develop Small Language Models (SLM) that are capable of complex reasoning that could be deployed securely and privately at the edge. Here we will discuss the research directions that we are pursuing to that end. First, we discuss how we can enable small open-source models to perform accurate function calling, which is a key component of agentic systems."[2]

Demo of TinyAgent-1B along with Whisper-v3 running locally deployed locally on a Macbook M3 Pro. The framework is open sourced and available at https://github.com/SqueezeAILab/TinyAgent

BingBot

It sounds like you're interested in cloud agents related to GitHub. Here are a few notable ones:

1. **Amazon CloudWatch Agent**: This agent helps you collect and export host-level metrics and logs from instances running on Linux or Windows servers. It's useful for monitoring and managing your infrastructure¹(https://github.com/aws/amazon-cloudwatch-agent).

2. **Arduino Cloud Agent**: This agent allows you to use Arduino Create applications to upload code to any USB-connected Arduino board directly from your browser. It runs in the background and works seamlessly with Arduino devices²(https://bing.com/search?q=git+hub+cloud+agent).

3. **SSH Agent Forwarding**: While not a cloud agent per se, SSH agent forwarding is a useful feature for securely connecting to GitHub repositories. It keeps your SSH key loaded in memory, so you don't need to enter your passphrase repeatedly³(https://docs.github.com/en/enterprise-cloud@latest/authentication/connecting-to-github-with-ssh/using-ssh-agent-forwarding).

4. **AgentCloud**: This is an open-source platform that enables companies to build and deploy private LLM chat apps, allowing teams to securely interact with their data⁴(https://github.com/rnadigital/agentcloud).


Source: Conversation with Copilot, 10/8/2024 

(1) Amazon CloudWatch Agent - GitHub. https://github.com/aws/amazon-cloudwatch-agent.
(2) arduino/arduino-create-agent: Arduino Cloud Agent - GitHub. https://bing.com/search?q=git+hub+cloud+agent.
(3) Using SSH agent forwarding - GitHub Enterprise Cloud Docs. https://docs.github.com/en/enterprise-cloud@latest/authentication/connecting-to-github-with-ssh/using-ssh-agent-forwarding.
(4) GitHub - rnadigital/agentcloud: Agent Cloud is like having your own GPT .... https://github.com/rnadigital/agentcloud.

Jamie Smith

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

Jamie Smith Mar 21, 2024

This is a PERSPECTIVE edition, a regular take on the future of digital customer relationships.

If you’re reading this and haven’t yet signed up, why not join over two thousand executives, entrepreneurs, designers, regulators and other digital leaders by clicking below. To the regular subscribers, thank you.

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?

If you’re enjoying this and want to dig deeper into Empowerment Tech, digital wallets and the future of digital customer engagement, why not sign up:

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.

References

  1. ↑ Daniel Tkacik, How Much Control Are People Willing to Grant to a Personal Privacy Assistant? (2020-06-18) Carnegie Mellon University CyLab Security and Privacy Institute https://orange.hosting.lsoft.com/trk/click?ref=znwrbbrs9_6-25b42x32309fx079946&
  2. ↑ Lutfi Eren Erdogan +9, TinyAgent: Function Calling at the Edge (2024-05-29) https://bair.berkeley.edu/blog/2024/05/29/tiny-agent/
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