Welcome to KYA — Know Your Agent.
Last night’s BCS, The Chartered Institute for IT event, The Era of Empowerment (Part 2), proved just as sharp and thought-provoking as the first instalment. Geoff Smith and Jamie Smith💡 painted a picture of customer engagement that turns the current model on its head. Right now, companies sit squarely in the middle, with customers orbiting dutifully around them, feeding data, attention, and the occasional review.
In Jamie’s vision, it’s the customer who becomes the planet. Companies orbit around us. We don’t do the heavy lifting ourselves; our AI agents do. These digital assistants will manage our data, handle our admin, and decide who can see what, when, and why.
Why manually update your address on fifty different platforms when your AI agent can sort it while you’re having a cuppa?
These ideas aren’t new, Tim Berners-Lee has long flown the flag for personal data control (see: Inrupt), and the UK government is quietly rolling out its GOV.UK Wallet to simplify access to things like driving licences. But now, AI agents offer a real pathway to make it all… actually happen.*
Like it or not, we’re already on the path to AI-mediated customer service. Most of us have had the joy of speaking to a chatbot, but this is only the beginning. OpenAI’s Operator and Google’s Project Mariner show where we’re headed: agents that don’t just parrot scripts but truly act on our behalf. The result? Agent-to-agent negotiation. Your virtual rep chats with theirs. What makes all this more than just another tech upgrade is simple:
It’s not a technical shift. It’s a power shift.
