Empowerment Technology

Full Title or Meme

Empowerment Technology is an extension of User Experience into the broader field of the impact of technology in their lives.

Context

2024-10-24 Jamie Smith Linked IN

The people ideating, designing and building. The people developing, delivering and testing. And the teams inside businesses who see the vast potential of ET, and are making the case for change. The use case, the business case, the investment case.

I’m going to make a prediction.

You feel that the pioneering work on ET is exhilarating, fascinating, and important. But it’s also exhausting, frustrating and requires weapons-grade levels of patience.

Why? Because this market is hard. And it’s supposed to be hard. In every corner of the ET market, it’s almost entirely new.

There isn’t a neat playbook for this.

How to think about wallet-to-wallet identity flows. How to design new commercial models for tech that’s not yet adopted at scale.

How to design the governance for these new data ecosystems. How to overlay existing legal frameworks or even to talk about it with compliance teams.

How to build the new user experience for an AI Agent. How to prove that it’s an AI agent at all.

If it was easy, it would have been done by now. But it got me thinking.

The Customer Futures network is special. It’s full of people paying attention to portable data, to privacy and to consumer empowerment. But also to digital wallets, Personal AI and verifiable credentials.

And it’s full of experts.

People with the professional and emotional scars from working at the coal face of the ET market. Leading, shipping, selling.
People who have successfully raised money for their ET projects, often the same people who have already tried and failed to build a pioneering personal data platform.
People working at large companies who believe ET can make a real difference to millions of customers, and can drive the next generation of digital transformation.
People who have tried eight different ways to talk about digital wallets and credentials with the ‘stakeholders’ who care about ‘ROI’ and ‘customer engagement’ this quarter.
And all the ET specialists in all the different niches - from UI and legal experts, to credential and system designers, to wallet architects and privacy teams.

Here’s where I’m going with this.

Having spent the last 18 months researching it, and speaking with many of you, I can see there’s a disconnect.

A gap between the teams who need some short term expert help, and the people and skills in the network.

Perhaps your ET project

Needs some temporary digital wallet expertise to plan and deliver a development sprint around personal data and SSI
Wants to understand the state of the art on trusted UI design and onboarding experiences
Needs to sense-check a decentralised ID architecture, or get an expert opinion about on mDL vs. VCs
Needs to discuss the investment case for verifiable credentials
Wants to understand how to respond to the latest developments with the EU Digital Identity wallet
Is exploring how Personal AI will impact customer engagement in a new product launch, and wants an outside sense-check
Needs a legal opinion on the T&Cs for a digital wallet (but don’t want to spend time and effort and cash just to educate your lawyer on the new data flows)

So here’s the question. Can we help?

I’m working on a new way to connect the right ET people to the right ET projects at the right time.

Because there are now over 3000 of us signed up to the Customer Futures newsletter across different channels.

That’s a lot of people interested in ET. Who care about digital customers. And who between us have the skills, expertise and capability to move the market for customer-controlled digital experiences.

We certainly don’t have all the answers. But together we probably know someone that can help.

Do you need short term help with digital wallets, verifiable credentials, data stores, Personal AI, or anything ET… however small?

Get In Touch: experts@customerfutures.com

We can help you find the skills and expertise you need. Maybe it’s an extra developer, tester or project manager for 6 weeks to get through the sprint. Maybe it’s only an expert Zoom call. Or a workshop.

Digital Experience Monitoring

As measured by Gartner quadrant chart.

• 2024-10-24 New Relic Named a Leader and Furthest in Vision in 2024 Gartner® Magic Quadrant™ for Digital Experience Monitoring New Relic Session Replay, part of its DEM offering, scores the highest of any vendor