Inevitability is such a curse

Attribution is Dead: The Slow and Sovereign Rise of Agentic Commerce

“When this emerging AI arrives, its very ubiquity will hide it” -

Part of our challenge with Agentic. Protocols have set out the stall for where these new world orders will eventually reside, out of sight, out of mind, but clearly in situ, in mind. Kevin Kelly wrote the inevitable in 2016. I am re reading it, again. Trying to help me untangle what is unique to my world of work or what is linked to the teenage years of my children. In 2002, he spoke with Larry Page (Google cofounder) at a party “Larry, I still don’t get it. There are so many search companies. Web search, for free? Where does that get you?” Page replied - “Oh, we’re really making an AI.” Describing the training and ending this page Kelly predicted:

By 2026 Google’s main product will not be search but AI. (written 10 years ago). He is an optimist for technology which is why I feel compelled to go back here. It is comforting, I think.

3 recent breakthroughs in have unleashed a 60 year conversation of AI is just around the corner - 1. Cheap Parallel Computation 2. Big Data and 3. Better Algos. This convergence putting ChatGPT and the likes into all of our hands compounds the learning. In 2015 researchers at Deepmind published a paper in Nature, describing how the taught an AI to learn to play a 1980s era arcade video game. Video Pinball. They did not teach it how to play, but how to learn to play. A profound difference. At first the AI plays nearly randomly, but it gradually improves. After half an hour, it misses only once every four times. By its 300th game, an hour into tit, it never misses. It keeps learning so fast that in the second hour it figures out a loophole in the Breakout game that none of the millions of previous human platters had discovered. This hack allowed it to win by tunneling around a wall in a way that even the games creators had never imagined.

This type of learning is happening today, at scale. And with speed. Again, he write in 2016, the business plans of the next 10,000 start ups are easy to forecast, Take X add AI. He then goes on to give a timeframe that now seems slow for the development of new minds. AGI it is called today and it is interesting where it lands.

He provides other directional indicators for the phase we are in now - one we are seemingly keen to speed up and slow down in equal measure. Agentic is in the phase in calls filtering. I am saying this, it is not fact. Ponder this - “Life is too short, there are too many books to read. Someone of something has to chose, whisper in our ear to help us. We need a way to triage. Our only choice is to get assistance in making choices.” Filters that exist today - we filter by curator - every retailer is a curator. We filter by brand - brands filter through the clutter. We filter by ourselves - choices and preferences, though it is rare. Amazon and its recommendation engine, ChatGPT the same are now the Chief Discovery mechanisms. They are more reliable because they use more signals. In reading this and researching it also got me thinking to how the signals arrive in the world of agentic. They don’t play out the same - Objectives are reached through shared plumbing data. Not through old world nuance like a cookie. It renders attribution dead in a fully agentic world. It asks questions of retail media and how it presents and stores data. Read that again, in Agentic commerce there is no need for the cookie. Is there a need for attribution now, bearing in mind you have to be everywhere the customer is whenever they want you all of the time. Attribution it seems is a problem only for those who cannot afford to be everywhere. And it is a bad at that.

But filtering leads to optimising - optimising, Steve Bartlett loves the term, is the the presented goal. My personal avatar, over time learns more and more and becomes a new manifestation of things I want and need or things I didnt know i need but now want or now want because the need is apparent - my health device let my credit card know that some aspirin might save my life on an upcoming flight. Extreme example maybe, but better than your fridge talking to your toilet and learning you are at that life stage that soy milk may be better for you than full fat. Underpinning much of this is privacy and this is where I feel there is a battle to be had and where the role of government and personal choice, education all play a part. This the day after the most Skynet partnership imaginable was announced, Apple AI will be powered by Gemini. So all of us with that power and that knowledge in our pockets will succumb to this new world - if we elect to. I am flipping forward with gusto to the chapter titled “tracking”.

“We tend to be uncomfortable being tracked today because we don’’t know much about who is watching us. We don’t know what they know. We have no say in how the information is used. They are not accountable.The relationship is unbalanced and asymmetrical. “ Agentic commerce to realise its potential is a world beyond commerce and retail. It is the assigning of a new social contract. I like the expression because it suggests we have some say rather than passively agreeing to what we end up with. (as I said, I am trying to be more optimistic). Personalization is being handed over if we are to be believe that agents can have a role in our shopping habits. An agreed route to transparency will be required. And my fear is we already handed this over, but i think it is where innovation and ecommerce goes beyond this year. Proactive management of our own privacy allows us to redraw the lines of how we want to behave in this bold new world, that we accept will happen. How is the only question. When is the piece of string, it is constant, without reprieve. “Greater personalisation requires greater transparency. Absolute personalisation (vanity) requires absolute transparency (no privacy).” Mull that over.

To visualise it picture these choices pinned on a slider bar -to the left is personal/transparent and on the right is private/generic. What has happened over time with technology is the opposite of what we claim to be true. We veer more towards personalized sharing - proven through social media usage. “The human impulse to share overwhelms the human impulse for privacy.” Vanity trumps privacy. This all suggests at some point Shopify have something to think about - user data and retailer numbers create a critical mass. With Agentic now converting at higher rate (their words, not mine) they need to figure out what Shop is or do we already know.

Privacy is one of those areas that we (consumers) will either take on as a proactive place to be in control or passively turn it over to our platform overlords (god I hate myself for using this expression). But we are talking now about our kids and their future - Finland doing a deal with Anthropic for all students to have a full account on the platform for the purposes of further education and learning. The UK on another side creating its first fully sovereign AI frontier model. The coalition includes some of Britain’s most prominent organisations, with Babcock International Group, BT, Lloyds Banking Group, LSEG, NatWest Group, PwC, Thales UK, Leonardo UK, BAE Systems and Telefónica Tech UK&I among those signing memoranda of understanding to participate in the model’s design phase.

The full list of coalition partners also includes Era4, Haleon and The Alan Turing Institute. Lumen Sovereign will be trained entirely on Isambard-AI, one of Europe’s most powerful supercomputers, using compute allocated through the UK government’s £500m Sovereign AI programme, with deployment readiness targeted by the end of 2026.

They won’t be the last.

It leads me to an area under explored but ripe for consideration - remixing is a chapter where Kelly turns to a theory of reusing existing resource to make new things, create new wealth. Paul Romer, an economist at NYU says that real sustainable development comes from re arranging existing resources. Layer on our filtering idea. “What if advertising followed the same trend of decentralization as other commercial sectors have? What is customers, created place and paid for ads?” Or from my part, sold their data back to the grid. When I mentioned this before, it was argued that we get this great resource for free - we don’t we paid for it, without ever being asked for it. We had industries spawned from open use and exploitation of our data. The Mad Men of Madison avenue would have loved this kind of access. And for free.

With all of the protocols developed, who will take on the development of the customer protocol? The protocol that occasionally tells an agent, go f*ck yourself. I am not having it today, my mood is not there. Maybe Apple and Google have done this in the existing small print, maybe our data is not our own and we are deluded. Or maybe the time is now for us to consider the most important protocol of all - the customer one. Over to your boffins.