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Today, we'll talk about why agentic commerce now needs contracts and why we need contracts as individuals when we use agents.
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And who better to talk about it than someone who's spent their entire career in the customer experience space, Nitin Bajatia.
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Hey, Nitin, thank you so much for joining.
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Thanks, Andreas.
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It's great to connect on this as well as reconnect generally speaking.
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Yeah.
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Reconnect's actually good, right?
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We've spent quite some time together at SAP while we were still there.
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Now we're both independent and not too long ago, we touched base again.
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We said,"Hey, this-- there's so much happening in, in this space, whether it's CX or also agentic AI.
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Wouldn't it be good to compare notes and share what we're each seeing?" So that's why we're here.
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But maybe, Nitin, for those members in the audience who don't know you quite as well as I do, can you share a little bit about yourself, who you are, and what you do?
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Sure.
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Professionally, I've been in the enterprise software space for almost three decades.
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Ended up in software almost by chance.
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Ex-banker actually in institutional banking, not the cool, investment banking side, but doing s- global syndicated risk and things like that.
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And pivoted over into technology.
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My first run was at Oracle of all places, right?
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Although I was in New York City at the time.
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Oracle and then I was called by a company you might have heard of called Siebel Systems to come over again- Not out here in California where I'm based out, but in New York City.
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All in the financial services practice and slowly meandered through, that world and eventually left and went into knowledge management, which was, I would call a precursor to AI in the sense that we were using machine algorithms, machine learning algorithms all along.
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In fact, in the customer service space, we used to call them case-based reasoning.
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And it was neural engine that ran, some of that logic.
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But it also tells you how much we've come in the last 25 years, is that our biggest customers back then were Cingular Wireless, which is now AT&T.
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And the US Department of Defense.
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What do the two-- what do those two have in common?
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They have unlimited budget, unlimited compute.
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The good thing for all of us today is that both of those has shrunk, so your average mom and pop can have access to maybe not unlimited compute and maybe not unlimited budget, but access to the same or similar AI.
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Yeah.
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And from there I, went back into larger businesses.
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I was at ServiceNow as part of the customer workflows team, and we built a fantastic product there and great success.
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And then SAP called and I was at SAP along with you for several years with the CX portfolio solution management where we did a bunch of innovation around sales and service and really set the foundation for how SAP also thinks about AI in those world.
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I was involved in that.
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I didn't build it, but but it's fascinating to watch, again, another large enterprise software vendor try to understand how customers need AI and how you deploy it.
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I think that's a key point, and I think now be- being independent, you need-- you have a different perspective on how software works, how the industry works, and looking at this through a more robust lens, I would say as many- are looking through it when we think about con- consumers or just, consumer type customers in, in, in that sense.
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Yeah.
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Yeah.
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So that's why I'm so excited to, to talk about a- agentic commerce- with you, and I even learned a thing or two about you in the last couple of minutes too.
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So that's always good.
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But hey, in in good old fashion, why don't we kick it off with a little question and a little-
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sure.
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I at least told you as, as much that this is the usual icebreaker.
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So let's see.
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Question is this when I press the buzzer, you see this sentence here: If AI were a color, what would it be?
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Oh.
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To make it a little more interesting, you have 60 seconds on the clock.
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So here we go.
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Okay.
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So thinking about AI and the black box that it largely is to most people and it just came to me.
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There's a obscure color, it's a proprietary color called Vantablack.
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It is considered the darkest black ever invented.
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So it's visible But it doesn't reflect light.
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And I've seen Van- Vantablack painted o- on a BMW.
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And it gives you the weirdest feeling because you could see that there's a physical car there, but you can't see, you can't see the contours and the reflections.
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And I think that's what AI is, at this point.
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It's like Vantablack.
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Okay.
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So you can't see the reflections, but it's definitely there, right?
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For sure.
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Yeah.
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I love that answer.
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I've heard many different variations in the responses to what color should it be, or do you think it is even to rainbow.
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But this shade of black, that's something else.
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Yeah.
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You...
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So wh- when you free up, ask your favorite LLM about Vantablack.
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It's very interesting.
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Awesome.
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Fantastic.
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So folks, if you're in the audience and you're just joining the stream, drop a comment in the chat where you're joining us from.
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I'm always curious to see how global our audience is.
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And if you want to learn about how we can encourage and empower your employees to use AI and use it well without creating slop, consider picking up a copy of my new book,"The Human Agentic AI Edge," on Amazon and pretty much anywhere you get your books.
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So with that out of the way let's see.
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There's so much happening, I don't even know where to start.
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And before we came on, we already ha- had a good conversation about this topic of a- agentic commerce and contracts and things.
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And I feel it's so innocent and so innocently discussed this topic of agents as a technology layer, as pieces of software that act on your behalf, that we miss a very critical point and that is consent.
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That is what are we actually agreeing to?
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What are agents- That's right agreeing to on, on our behalf?
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And I know you've written quite a bit about that on, on, on your Substack.
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So I thought maybe you can share a little bit more about what you're seeing from your vantage point, Sure whether it's in agentic commerce or the a- agentic web as a broader term.
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Why do we need contracts?
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Where are we right now?
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Yeah.
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I think-- Let me start with the beginning.
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Credit where credit's due throughout my, career in enterprise software, we've always built some very successful b- businesses had success with our customers.
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But there's one thing that bothered me about this space, which was this notion that we were collecting data without getting- explicit permission from customers.
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Now, for the most part, I'm not talking about ad tech.
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Ad tech is a whole other space and it has problems.
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But along the way, I came across a legend in the industry, Doc Searls who was one of the authors of The Cluetrain Manifesto in the late'90s.
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He had been working on a project called Project VRM, which is obscure, but at the Berkman Klein Center at the Harvard Law School.
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And the entire premise of it was How do individuals secure privacy on the web in the same way that we have it in the natural world?
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This was 2007, 2008.
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Okay.
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And in fact, many of us in the CRM world ended up at Harvard Law School because Doc had invited us to come defend ourselves.
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Yeah.
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And I I joke with Doc nowadays that we all showed up with our pitchforks in hand to say,"We're not the ones causing the problem." A-and actually, we emerged out of those days at the law school fully aligned saying part of the data challenge of CRM, is not good data because it's based off of surveillance.
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It's not based off of what I proffer.
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And so that kicked off a journey.
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Project VRM, quote-unquote,"graduated" from Harvard became a nonprofit called Customer Commons, which I sit on the board of, full disclosure.
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And we've been pursuing a path to how do we make this happen?
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Although I was not directly involved in this, various other board members and others were involved in creating a new standard which has been set forth by IEEE.
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It went live this January.
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It's IEEE 7012 which is the formal term, but we call it My Terms.
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And My Terms really says that consent is not equal to contract.
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The world and the web we've built to date is based off of this notion of a terms of service.
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And the terms of service is usually before I even tell you what I can do and what I can offer you, you need to agree to everything that I've said.
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In the physical world, that just doesn't happen.
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You don't walk into a Trader Joe's where they-- before you enter the door, they say you need to agree to everything we're gonna do and track you- before you can c- before you can buy, your weekly ration of cookie butter." And if Trader Joe's, that stuff's hard to find.
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And I use Trader Joe's as an example'cause I think they're a perfect example of a successful business in the physical world in that, they don't have a loyalty program.
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They don't really-- You know, they're not inserting tracking beacons on your head as you walk around and walk back out.
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Yeah.
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Yeah.
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We know that the digital commerce world has done that over the last couple of decades.
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But that's also a factor of the fact that it's only been a couple of decades that we've been online.
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Yes.
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Yeah.
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With the arrival of the a- agentic world, the idea of contract or essentially a customer being the first party in a transaction is become super critical.
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And so the timing, although when we started this process, we couldn't have predicted the rise of agentic AI, it is now here.
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Yeah.
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So now you can imagine a world where your agent, my agent, goes out into the world and is acting on our behalf.
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There's multiple things.
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First of all, the instruction.
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Go find me, the best deal on, a bathroom fixture, and they can scour and do that stuff.
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But if you're a recipient, you wanna know that agent is o- operating on the fiduciary, constructs of the person that l- you know, put out into the digital world.
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But is also carrying contract, capabilities.
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And so IEEE 7012, my term is to say, here is a protocol in which this contract, which is taking legalese, putting it into human readable so you can-- so the average non-lawyer can understand it, but making it machine executable- Is now possible.
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And so that's where we're going, right?
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If agents are gonna act on our behalf, and right now maybe just one or two, you're gonna have hundreds of agents.
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For both sides of that to exist with peace, to know that whatever happened was done with the right- Set of rights, you need to have this new framework.
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And it's being developed and it's not, fully there.
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But it's super exciting to be a part of because besides for all of that, you can also now as if you have a contract, you're more willing to share more relevant information.
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So I think that gets really interesting because when was it, I think last year OpenAI started partnering with PayPal, started partnering with Walmart.
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Couple weeks ago, I I got a marketing email from Starbucks that I can now or- order my latte via ChatGPT.
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Yeah.
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A couple weeks ago, I think OpenAI said,"Hey we want to learn more about your banking and your financial assets so we can advise you if you have questions." So there, there's more and more of these seemingly little steps that add to a much fuller picture where I can clearly see that whether it's consumers or it's businesses to businesses in, in the near future transacting with the help of agents.
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We've had this vision for quite a long time.
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You have these agents that organize your travel, whether it's business travel or it's travel for leisure.
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You just tell them where they, where you want to go.
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It figures out your favorite airline loyalty program, hotel ground transportation and whatnot.
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And while some of that still seems futuristic, some agents can do it already, but certainly when they act on your behalf and you end up with a ticket that's twice the amount you are willing to pay for or would've paid for if you executed it yourself, gets hard to dispute it when an agent acted on your behalf.
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So things like the- the My Terms that you mentioned seem to become more and more important and critical there.
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That's right.
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And it's, Think about it as the equivalent of a financial receipt, right?
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So when you go buy something, you get a receipt handed back saying,"This is what transacted." My Terms is the the legal receipt to say,"This is what we agreed to." And what we're proposing is that a nonprofit or a neutral party such as Customer Commons where I sit or elsewhere, have standard contracts that you can then say,"This is the contract I want to have for my day-to-day interaction.
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This is a contract that's a little bit more complex." In the same way that Creative Commons does for artistic work today.
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Yeah.
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That's interesting, yeah.
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Like I said I read the blog post you published and I was wondering what do you mean by nonprofit?
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How would that be governed?
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How can you a-access the different templates or variations of what you're willing to share and to disclose, what you're willing to accept?
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But something like the Creative Commons, that's a good analogy.
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That makes sense.
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In
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fact, it was Creative Commons that inspired Customer Commons, our, our initiative.
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And I'm-- in fact Doc says that Larry Lessig, who the champion for Creative Commons, actually Parliament to go down this path, and so this is the path that we've pursued
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So question for you though, what is the in-incentive for vendors to, to play along, to adopt the standard, to adopt the protocol like this when, like you said, there, th-there has been this surveillance-type data gather gathering in inference going on for a couple decades.
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Why give that up and why say,"Okay, we commit to honoring this protocol, these terms in exchanging in-information here and negotiating." Why do that?
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Why all of a sudden be, be better than w-what the industry has been?
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I think it's a question we ponder every single day in this initiative.
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Now we have some of the larger standard bearers in the industry- not only endorsing it, but building and embedding this into their applications.
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And so that gives us hope.
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Doesn't give us a guarantee that it'll be followed, but it gives us hope.
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And that's one of the challenges and one of the fun things about doing something that's really for, I would say, the benefit of everybody.
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I frame it this way from my CRM/CX lens.
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The ultimate challenge of executing value for customers is understanding the context that the customer uses your product or service.
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A surveilled customer is less likely to share context than one that has been contract-- that has reached a mutual contractual ar-arrangement.
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In the same way that you mentioned, OpenAI and others now working with the big financial institutions.
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I'm not willing to share my personal savings and strategy with anybody who says they're a financial expert.
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No, I want a certified financial planner, somebody who has reached a high bar, and then with them I'll say,"Look, here's where my savings are.
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This is what I prep for my teenagers', college years," and so on and so forth.
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That bar should be the standard in the digital world because it is in the physical world.
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You don't walk into, again, Trader Joe's- And, go pay for your cookie butter and then they ask you about your spouse and, and what they did last night and, a- and all that stuff.
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It's just it's downright creepy.
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Yeah.
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So another thought that comes to mind there, w- in the physical world when you have a contract, whether it's on paper or a PDF or a DocuSign or something, there's usually a back and forth.
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There's some red lining.
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You're more in- involved in the process or maybe your your legal representation is.
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What does it look like when two agents are comparing these terms and how do you ensure that they still act in, in good faith for- Yeah for their respective party that they are the proxy for?
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I think that answer will depend on, to be very honest, geographic and political constructs that you're operating in.
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The efforts around My Terms in Europe are taking shape in a very different way because, as the old adage goes the US innovates and Europe regulates.
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They're starting with the regulation working their way down, and lots of good things to be learned there.
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Yeah.
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I think like all security, vigilance is going to be required and ag- and as the first sets of agents carrying the protocol are gonna get out in the world, we'll learn and we'll develop.
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And the goal is that you have, an agent that's acting on your behalf with- And evolving of-- obviously AI is going to be tuning that agent over time as well.
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Yeah.
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So a couple years ago, I I read one of the popular negotiation books by, by-- or that, that was published through Harvard Business Review.
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I don't really-- I, I remember what the title was, but it was one of the ones where basically the premise is think win-win grow the pie.
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Don't- Yeah be so set on, on, on your own on your own position and don't think win, win or lose, but think win-win.
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So in this sense of win-win, when these agents negotiate terms and say the vendor says,"These are my terms," your agent says,"This is what I will a-agree to," do you see a like different levels of what an individual or what another contracting party is willing to accept to say, this is the high bar where we'll start-" but this is the minimum that I need to have guaranteed, otherwise I'm not going to-" yeah agree at, at all." So some different variations of this.
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Yes.
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W-what the standard proposes today, in its early days, are five presets, templates of terms today, right?
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Simple, the basic one is called SD Base or essentially service delivery.
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In other words, I transact with you, you transact with me, and we're done.
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You're not capturing any additional data.
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It's like walking into a Trader Joe's and offering cash.
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Yep.
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You have the product, you leave.
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We-- where we are today in the digital world is on the exact opposite extreme.
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You end up on a random website to buy something, and because they put cookie trackers all over their website, they will follow you potentially forever.
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And you never agree to that or assume you agree to it, right?
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And so I think, there's an evolution that will happen and the negotiation process, it'll be interesting to see how it evolves.
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There's active development underway to build those interaction buses.
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But w-we will arrive at a workable equilibrium, and you have to start somewhere.
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Starting somewhere.
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That's probably a good last question before we wrap it up.
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But what do you recommend where should organizations start looking at this?
00:20:47.456 --> 00:20:54.296
Who even in the organization should familiarize themselves with this new standard in- Yeah what are some of the first steps that they should take?
00:20:55.056 --> 00:21:09.336
So y- you can go to the IEEE website and download the standard, which is the IEEE 7012 and probably good reading for an insomniac.
00:21:10.476 --> 00:21:14.246
We have simplified that with a website called myterms.info.
00:21:14.976 --> 00:21:19.226
And that's really for the layperson to understand what's being built.
00:21:19.756 --> 00:21:29.936
The first working tools are emerging, and the plan is to put that links to those,'cause myterms.info is agnostic.
00:21:29.936 --> 00:21:34.176
It's not promotional in any which way except to promote the fact that-
00:21:34.776 --> 00:21:34.855
Yeah
00:21:34.855 --> 00:21:44.375
the individual should have a contract or have more rights on their own identity and data information than they do today.
00:21:46.186 --> 00:21:46.726
Fantastic.
00:21:47.326 --> 00:21:53.186
So what would you say are the key three takeaways that you would want our audience to take away from our conversation today?
00:21:53.186 --> 00:22:04.135
We've covered a lot of ground from contracts- Yeah and consent not equaling contracts to what the standard looks like, where to find it, where this is today, where this is going.
00:22:05.066 --> 00:22:05.836
What should people take away?
00:22:07.086 --> 00:22:10.656
So I think the number one i- is not to obsess about the technology.
00:22:11.426 --> 00:22:26.635
To think about how your real world physical interactions happen in a day-to-day basis and how simple it can be, and why it's become so complex in the digital world, even though it's supposedly convenience.
00:22:27.385 --> 00:22:42.125
Second is to recognize that the terms of service that you inherently agree to aren't enforceable, but you're signing away access to more data than you can imagine.
00:22:42.846 --> 00:22:47.628
And the third, which is my- The ominous aspect of this.
00:22:47.837 --> 00:22:50.208
But the third piece of this is all temporary.
00:22:50.788 --> 00:22:58.758
W-we are in the Precambrian era of technology, we're only two, maybe three decades in.
00:22:59.567 --> 00:23:03.938
And a-as humans, we've conducted commerce for millennia.
00:23:05.557 --> 00:23:24.688
And so there's so much to learn from and bring into digital world to drive equilibrium for not only for those of us who are successfully, living in this world, but those that are gonna come online, the 50% of the world that's still not online yet, and give them a place where they can come with respect.
00:23:26.398 --> 00:23:26.958
Fantastic.
00:23:28.048 --> 00:23:37.178
It was a pleasure learning from you and hearing more about My Terms, hearing about the standards, hearing about what we need to, make agentic commerce real.
00:23:37.688 --> 00:23:45.218
A different aspect of just saying,"Hey, agents can tran- can transact on your behalf," but how do we reconcile this- Yeah and mirror what we have in the physical world?
00:23:45.218 --> 00:23:49.958
And as as always, I en-enjoy talking to you so much and always learn something new.
00:23:50.018 --> 00:23:51.708
So Nitin, thank you so much for your time.
00:23:52.168 --> 00:23:52.307
Yeah.
00:23:52.988 --> 00:23:53.258
Thank you.
00:23:53.258 --> 00:23:56.597
Thank you for having me on and looking forward to continue the conversation.
00:23:57.347 --> 00:23:57.978
Absolutely.
00:00:30.679 --> 00:00:37.420
Today, we'll talk about why agentic commerce now needs contracts and why we need contracts as individuals when we use agents.
00:00:37.920 --> 00:00:44.609
And who better to talk about it than someone who's spent their entire career in the customer experience space, Nitin Bajatia.
00:00:44.640 --> 00:00:46.460
Hey, Nitin, thank you so much for joining.
00:00:47.450 --> 00:00:48.099
Thanks, Andreas.
00:00:48.099 --> 00:00:52.140
It's great to connect on this as well as reconnect generally speaking.
00:00:52.579 --> 00:00:52.730
Yeah.
00:00:52.730 --> 00:00:54.039
Reconnect's actually good, right?
00:00:54.039 --> 00:00:57.269
We've spent quite some time together at SAP while we were still there.
00:00:57.269 --> 00:01:01.079
Now we're both independent and not too long ago, we touched base again.
00:01:01.079 --> 00:01:06.609
We said,"Hey, this-- there's so much happening in, in this space, whether it's CX or also agentic AI.
00:01:06.870 --> 00:01:11.450
Wouldn't it be good to compare notes and share what we're each seeing?" So that's why we're here.
00:01:11.450 --> 00:01:18.939
But maybe, Nitin, for those members in the audience who don't know you quite as well as I do, can you share a little bit about yourself, who you are, and what you do?
00:01:19.939 --> 00:01:20.230
Sure.
00:01:20.230 --> 00:01:24.450
Professionally, I've been in the enterprise software space for almost three decades.
00:01:24.879 --> 00:01:28.609
Ended up in software almost by chance.
00:01:28.640 --> 00:01:37.259
Ex-banker actually in institutional banking, not the cool, investment banking side, but doing s- global syndicated risk and things like that.
00:01:37.539 --> 00:01:40.060
And pivoted over into technology.
00:01:40.259 --> 00:01:42.929
My first run was at Oracle of all places, right?
00:01:42.929 --> 00:01:44.189
Although I was in New York City at the time.
00:01:44.569 --> 00:01:56.239
Oracle and then I was called by a company you might have heard of called Siebel Systems to come over again- Not out here in California where I'm based out, but in New York City.
00:01:56.640 --> 00:02:11.210
All in the financial services practice and slowly meandered through, that world and eventually left and went into knowledge management, which was, I would call a precursor to AI in the sense that we were using machine algorithms, machine learning algorithms all along.
00:02:11.210 --> 00:02:15.830
In fact, in the customer service space, we used to call them case-based reasoning.
00:02:16.250 --> 00:02:19.140
And it was neural engine that ran, some of that logic.
00:02:19.629 --> 00:02:28.099
But it also tells you how much we've come in the last 25 years, is that our biggest customers back then were Cingular Wireless, which is now AT&T.
00:02:28.500 --> 00:02:30.430
And the US Department of Defense.
00:02:30.789 --> 00:02:33.400
What do the two-- what do those two have in common?
00:02:33.900 --> 00:02:37.270
They have unlimited budget, unlimited compute.
00:02:37.650 --> 00:02:49.250
The good thing for all of us today is that both of those has shrunk, so your average mom and pop can have access to maybe not unlimited compute and maybe not unlimited budget, but access to the same or similar AI.
00:02:49.849 --> 00:02:49.979
Yeah.
00:02:50.060 --> 00:02:52.490
And from there I, went back into larger businesses.
00:02:52.539 --> 00:02:58.189
I was at ServiceNow as part of the customer workflows team, and we built a fantastic product there and great success.
00:02:58.579 --> 00:03:14.469
And then SAP called and I was at SAP along with you for several years with the CX portfolio solution management where we did a bunch of innovation around sales and service and really set the foundation for how SAP also thinks about AI in those world.
00:03:14.789 --> 00:03:15.789
I was involved in that.
00:03:15.819 --> 00:03:26.629
I didn't build it, but but it's fascinating to watch, again, another large enterprise software vendor try to understand how customers need AI and how you deploy it.
00:03:27.579 --> 00:03:46.939
I think that's a key point, and I think now be- being independent, you need-- you have a different perspective on how software works, how the industry works, and looking at this through a more robust lens, I would say as many- are looking through it when we think about con- consumers or just, consumer type customers in, in, in that sense.
00:03:47.310 --> 00:03:47.449
Yeah.
00:03:47.659 --> 00:03:47.759
Yeah.
00:03:47.789 --> 00:03:55.219
So that's why I'm so excited to, to talk about a- agentic commerce- with you, and I even learned a thing or two about you in the last couple of minutes too.
00:03:55.219 --> 00:03:56.060
So that's always good.
00:03:56.729 --> 00:04:03.289
But hey, in in good old fashion, why don't we kick it off with a little question and a little-
00:04:03.389 --> 00:04:03.539
sure.
00:04:04.109 --> 00:04:07.719
I at least told you as, as much that this is the usual icebreaker.
00:04:07.769 --> 00:04:08.310
So let's see.
00:04:08.889 --> 00:04:15.069
Question is this when I press the buzzer, you see this sentence here: If AI were a color, what would it be?
00:04:15.069 --> 00:04:15.269
Oh.
00:04:15.379 --> 00:04:18.540
To make it a little more interesting, you have 60 seconds on the clock.
00:04:18.939 --> 00:04:20.180
So here we go.
00:04:21.684 --> 00:04:21.944
Okay.
00:04:22.293 --> 00:04:31.424
So thinking about AI and the black box that it largely is to most people and it just came to me.
00:04:31.624 --> 00:04:35.334
There's a obscure color, it's a proprietary color called Vantablack.
00:04:36.524 --> 00:04:42.374
It is considered the darkest black ever invented.
00:04:42.853 --> 00:04:46.673
So it's visible But it doesn't reflect light.
00:04:47.814 --> 00:04:51.543
And I've seen Van- Vantablack painted o- on a BMW.
00:04:51.593 --> 00:05:00.663
And it gives you the weirdest feeling because you could see that there's a physical car there, but you can't see, you can't see the contours and the reflections.
00:05:01.053 --> 00:05:03.884
And I think that's what AI is, at this point.
00:05:04.254 --> 00:05:05.463
It's like Vantablack.
00:05:05.843 --> 00:05:06.423
Okay.
00:05:06.423 --> 00:05:09.454
So you can't see the reflections, but it's definitely there, right?
00:05:09.454 --> 00:05:09.963
For sure.
00:05:10.243 --> 00:05:10.473
Yeah.
00:05:10.634 --> 00:05:11.413
I love that answer.
00:05:11.564 --> 00:05:17.423
I've heard many different variations in the responses to what color should it be, or do you think it is even to rainbow.
00:05:17.814 --> 00:05:19.993
But this shade of black, that's something else.
00:05:20.124 --> 00:05:20.343
Yeah.
00:05:20.343 --> 00:05:20.613
You...
00:05:20.783 --> 00:05:26.293
So wh- when you free up, ask your favorite LLM about Vantablack.
00:05:26.293 --> 00:05:27.264
It's very interesting.
00:05:28.014 --> 00:05:28.403
Awesome.
00:05:28.403 --> 00:05:28.963
Fantastic.
00:05:29.413 --> 00:05:34.163
So folks, if you're in the audience and you're just joining the stream, drop a comment in the chat where you're joining us from.
00:05:34.233 --> 00:05:36.793
I'm always curious to see how global our audience is.
00:05:36.824 --> 00:05:50.963
And if you want to learn about how we can encourage and empower your employees to use AI and use it well without creating slop, consider picking up a copy of my new book,"The Human Agentic AI Edge," on Amazon and pretty much anywhere you get your books.
00:05:51.603 --> 00:05:54.233
So with that out of the way let's see.
00:05:56.274 --> 00:05:58.793
There's so much happening, I don't even know where to start.
00:05:59.074 --> 00:06:06.363
And before we came on, we already ha- had a good conversation about this topic of a- agentic commerce and contracts and things.
00:06:06.423 --> 00:06:22.033
And I feel it's so innocent and so innocently discussed this topic of agents as a technology layer, as pieces of software that act on your behalf, that we miss a very critical point and that is consent.
00:06:22.033 --> 00:06:24.084
That is what are we actually agreeing to?
00:06:24.084 --> 00:06:27.314
What are agents- That's right agreeing to on, on our behalf?
00:06:27.783 --> 00:06:30.324
And I know you've written quite a bit about that on, on, on your Substack.
00:06:30.704 --> 00:06:39.713
So I thought maybe you can share a little bit more about what you're seeing from your vantage point, Sure whether it's in agentic commerce or the a- agentic web as a broader term.
00:06:40.384 --> 00:06:41.713
Why do we need contracts?
00:06:41.793 --> 00:06:42.793
Where are we right now?
00:06:43.944 --> 00:06:44.483
Yeah.
00:06:45.493 --> 00:06:47.793
I think-- Let me start with the beginning.
00:06:47.903 --> 00:06:56.454
Credit where credit's due throughout my, career in enterprise software, we've always built some very successful b- businesses had success with our customers.
00:06:56.843 --> 00:07:07.447
But there's one thing that bothered me about this space, which was this notion that we were collecting data without getting- explicit permission from customers.
00:07:07.737 --> 00:07:10.608
Now, for the most part, I'm not talking about ad tech.
00:07:10.677 --> 00:07:13.658
Ad tech is a whole other space and it has problems.
00:07:14.237 --> 00:07:23.168
But along the way, I came across a legend in the industry, Doc Searls who was one of the authors of The Cluetrain Manifesto in the late'90s.
00:07:23.687 --> 00:07:33.147
He had been working on a project called Project VRM, which is obscure, but at the Berkman Klein Center at the Harvard Law School.
00:07:34.367 --> 00:07:46.242
And the entire premise of it was How do individuals secure privacy on the web in the same way that we have it in the natural world?
00:07:46.682 --> 00:07:49.651
This was 2007, 2008.
00:07:49.651 --> 00:07:49.911
Okay.
00:07:51.552 --> 00:07:58.901
And in fact, many of us in the CRM world ended up at Harvard Law School because Doc had invited us to come defend ourselves.
00:07:59.521 --> 00:07:59.612
Yeah.
00:07:59.671 --> 00:08:18.171
And I I joke with Doc nowadays that we all showed up with our pitchforks in hand to say,"We're not the ones causing the problem." A-and actually, we emerged out of those days at the law school fully aligned saying part of the data challenge of CRM, is not good data because it's based off of surveillance.
00:08:18.262 --> 00:08:20.971
It's not based off of what I proffer.
00:08:21.562 --> 00:08:22.701
And so that kicked off a journey.
00:08:24.151 --> 00:08:30.901
Project VRM, quote-unquote,"graduated" from Harvard became a nonprofit called Customer Commons, which I sit on the board of, full disclosure.
00:08:31.641 --> 00:08:37.201
And we've been pursuing a path to how do we make this happen?
00:08:37.902 --> 00:08:45.152
Although I was not directly involved in this, various other board members and others were involved in creating a new standard which has been set forth by IEEE.
00:08:45.882 --> 00:08:47.412
It went live this January.
00:08:47.752 --> 00:08:53.252
It's IEEE 7012 which is the formal term, but we call it My Terms.
00:08:53.632 --> 00:08:59.961
And My Terms really says that consent is not equal to contract.
00:09:01.012 --> 00:09:05.912
The world and the web we've built to date is based off of this notion of a terms of service.
00:09:06.522 --> 00:09:13.322
And the terms of service is usually before I even tell you what I can do and what I can offer you, you need to agree to everything that I've said.
00:09:14.792 --> 00:09:16.402
In the physical world, that just doesn't happen.
00:09:16.501 --> 00:09:28.381
You don't walk into a Trader Joe's where they-- before you enter the door, they say you need to agree to everything we're gonna do and track you- before you can c- before you can buy, your weekly ration of cookie butter." And if Trader Joe's, that stuff's hard to find.
00:09:29.052 --> 00:09:38.141
And I use Trader Joe's as an example'cause I think they're a perfect example of a successful business in the physical world in that, they don't have a loyalty program.
00:09:38.141 --> 00:09:43.052
They don't really-- You know, they're not inserting tracking beacons on your head as you walk around and walk back out.
00:09:43.052 --> 00:09:43.221
Yeah.
00:09:43.652 --> 00:09:43.741
Yeah.
00:09:44.761 --> 00:09:51.094
We know that the digital commerce world has done that over the last couple of decades.
00:09:51.533 --> 00:09:55.274
But that's also a factor of the fact that it's only been a couple of decades that we've been online.
00:09:56.033 --> 00:09:56.193
Yes.
00:09:56.533 --> 00:09:56.644
Yeah.
00:09:57.474 --> 00:10:10.884
With the arrival of the a- agentic world, the idea of contract or essentially a customer being the first party in a transaction is become super critical.
00:10:10.913 --> 00:10:17.453
And so the timing, although when we started this process, we couldn't have predicted the rise of agentic AI, it is now here.
00:10:18.153 --> 00:10:18.213
Yeah.
00:10:18.614 --> 00:10:28.793
So now you can imagine a world where your agent, my agent, goes out into the world and is acting on our behalf.
00:10:29.514 --> 00:10:30.533
There's multiple things.
00:10:30.533 --> 00:10:31.634
First of all, the instruction.
00:10:31.634 --> 00:10:38.783
Go find me, the best deal on, a bathroom fixture, and they can scour and do that stuff.
00:10:39.994 --> 00:10:52.063
But if you're a recipient, you wanna know that agent is o- operating on the fiduciary, constructs of the person that l- you know, put out into the digital world.
00:10:52.553 --> 00:10:55.073
But is also carrying contract, capabilities.
00:10:55.073 --> 00:11:14.594
And so IEEE 7012, my term is to say, here is a protocol in which this contract, which is taking legalese, putting it into human readable so you can-- so the average non-lawyer can understand it, but making it machine executable- Is now possible.
00:11:14.913 --> 00:11:17.124
And so that's where we're going, right?
00:11:17.124 --> 00:11:22.083
If agents are gonna act on our behalf, and right now maybe just one or two, you're gonna have hundreds of agents.
00:11:24.163 --> 00:11:35.153
For both sides of that to exist with peace, to know that whatever happened was done with the right- Set of rights, you need to have this new framework.
00:11:35.254 --> 00:11:38.293
And it's being developed and it's not, fully there.
00:11:38.293 --> 00:11:49.303
But it's super exciting to be a part of because besides for all of that, you can also now as if you have a contract, you're more willing to share more relevant information.
00:11:50.354 --> 00:11:58.183
So I think that gets really interesting because when was it, I think last year OpenAI started partnering with PayPal, started partnering with Walmart.
00:11:58.533 --> 00:12:04.803
Couple weeks ago, I I got a marketing email from Starbucks that I can now or- order my latte via ChatGPT.
00:12:05.303 --> 00:12:05.364
Yeah.
00:12:05.443 --> 00:12:32.024
A couple weeks ago, I think OpenAI said,"Hey we want to learn more about your banking and your financial assets so we can advise you if you have questions." So there, there's more and more of these seemingly little steps that add to a much fuller picture where I can clearly see that whether it's consumers or it's businesses to businesses in, in the near future transacting with the help of agents.
00:12:32.183 --> 00:12:33.874
We've had this vision for quite a long time.
00:12:33.874 --> 00:12:38.384
You have these agents that organize your travel, whether it's business travel or it's travel for leisure.
00:12:39.283 --> 00:12:41.384
You just tell them where they, where you want to go.
00:12:41.384 --> 00:12:46.793
It figures out your favorite airline loyalty program, hotel ground transportation and whatnot.
00:12:47.453 --> 00:13:03.573
And while some of that still seems futuristic, some agents can do it already, but certainly when they act on your behalf and you end up with a ticket that's twice the amount you are willing to pay for or would've paid for if you executed it yourself, gets hard to dispute it when an agent acted on your behalf.
00:13:03.573 --> 00:13:08.894
So things like the- the My Terms that you mentioned seem to become more and more important and critical there.
00:13:10.073 --> 00:13:10.583
That's right.
00:13:10.583 --> 00:13:15.533
And it's, Think about it as the equivalent of a financial receipt, right?
00:13:15.533 --> 00:14:00.083
So when you go buy something, you get a receipt handed back saying,"This is what transacted." My Terms is the the legal receipt to say,"This is what we agreed to." And what we're proposing is that a nonprofit or a neutral party such as Customer Commons where I sit or elsewhere, have standard contracts that you can then say,"This is the contract I want to have for my day-to-day interaction.
00:14:00.083 --> 00:14:08.843
This is a contract that's a little bit more complex." In the same way that Creative Commons does for artistic work today.
00:14:08.953 --> 00:14:09.073
Yeah.
00:14:11.309 --> 00:14:12.299
That's interesting, yeah.
00:14:12.469 --> 00:14:16.889
Like I said I read the blog post you published and I was wondering what do you mean by nonprofit?
00:14:16.889 --> 00:14:17.909
How would that be governed?
00:14:17.909 --> 00:14:25.699
How can you a-access the different templates or variations of what you're willing to share and to disclose, what you're willing to accept?
00:14:26.129 --> 00:14:28.889
But something like the Creative Commons, that's a good analogy.
00:14:29.129 --> 00:14:29.879
That makes sense.
00:14:30.639 --> 00:14:30.699
In
00:14:30.699 --> 00:14:37.289
fact, it was Creative Commons that inspired Customer Commons, our, our initiative.
00:14:37.289 --> 00:14:47.739
And I'm-- in fact Doc says that Larry Lessig, who the champion for Creative Commons, actually Parliament to go down this path, and so this is the path that we've pursued
00:14:49.149 --> 00:15:07.709
So question for you though, what is the in-incentive for vendors to, to play along, to adopt the standard, to adopt the protocol like this when, like you said, there, th-there has been this surveillance-type data gather gathering in inference going on for a couple decades.
00:15:08.329 --> 00:15:18.000
Why give that up and why say,"Okay, we commit to honoring this protocol, these terms in exchanging in-information here and negotiating." Why do that?
00:15:18.079 --> 00:15:21.929
Why all of a sudden be, be better than w-what the industry has been?
00:15:23.120 --> 00:15:27.309
I think it's a question we ponder every single day in this initiative.
00:15:27.309 --> 00:15:38.829
Now we have some of the larger standard bearers in the industry- not only endorsing it, but building and embedding this into their applications.
00:15:39.079 --> 00:15:40.539
And so that gives us hope.
00:15:41.429 --> 00:15:44.529
Doesn't give us a guarantee that it'll be followed, but it gives us hope.
00:15:45.120 --> 00:15:52.099
And that's one of the challenges and one of the fun things about doing something that's really for, I would say, the benefit of everybody.
00:15:52.199 --> 00:15:56.319
I frame it this way from my CRM/CX lens.
00:15:57.349 --> 00:16:08.159
The ultimate challenge of executing value for customers is understanding the context that the customer uses your product or service.
00:16:09.329 --> 00:16:18.809
A surveilled customer is less likely to share context than one that has been contract-- that has reached a mutual contractual ar-arrangement.
00:16:19.399 --> 00:16:27.199
In the same way that you mentioned, OpenAI and others now working with the big financial institutions.
00:16:27.889 --> 00:16:37.629
I'm not willing to share my personal savings and strategy with anybody who says they're a financial expert.
00:16:37.809 --> 00:16:46.159
No, I want a certified financial planner, somebody who has reached a high bar, and then with them I'll say,"Look, here's where my savings are.
00:16:46.159 --> 00:16:51.120
This is what I prep for my teenagers', college years," and so on and so forth.
00:16:51.479 --> 00:16:56.259
That bar should be the standard in the digital world because it is in the physical world.
00:16:56.259 --> 00:17:07.980
You don't walk into, again, Trader Joe's- And, go pay for your cookie butter and then they ask you about your spouse and, and what they did last night and, a- and all that stuff.
00:17:07.980 --> 00:17:09.630
It's just it's downright creepy.
00:17:10.269 --> 00:17:10.440
Yeah.
00:17:10.950 --> 00:17:21.250
So another thought that comes to mind there, w- in the physical world when you have a contract, whether it's on paper or a PDF or a DocuSign or something, there's usually a back and forth.
00:17:21.329 --> 00:17:22.390
There's some red lining.
00:17:22.390 --> 00:17:27.240
You're more in- involved in the process or maybe your your legal representation is.
00:17:27.740 --> 00:17:40.700
What does it look like when two agents are comparing these terms and how do you ensure that they still act in, in good faith for- Yeah for their respective party that they are the proxy for?
00:17:42.200 --> 00:17:50.299
I think that answer will depend on, to be very honest, geographic and political constructs that you're operating in.
00:17:50.829 --> 00:17:59.410
The efforts around My Terms in Europe are taking shape in a very different way because, as the old adage goes the US innovates and Europe regulates.
00:17:59.970 --> 00:18:05.160
They're starting with the regulation working their way down, and lots of good things to be learned there.
00:18:05.190 --> 00:18:05.259
Yeah.
00:18:06.130 --> 00:18:19.769
I think like all security, vigilance is going to be required and ag- and as the first sets of agents carrying the protocol are gonna get out in the world, we'll learn and we'll develop.
00:18:19.769 --> 00:18:32.926
And the goal is that you have, an agent that's acting on your behalf with- And evolving of-- obviously AI is going to be tuning that agent over time as well.
00:18:33.226 --> 00:18:33.346
Yeah.
00:18:35.026 --> 00:18:42.476
So a couple years ago, I I read one of the popular negotiation books by, by-- or that, that was published through Harvard Business Review.
00:18:42.566 --> 00:18:50.216
I don't really-- I, I remember what the title was, but it was one of the ones where basically the premise is think win-win grow the pie.
00:18:50.446 --> 00:18:57.176
Don't- Yeah be so set on, on, on your own on your own position and don't think win, win or lose, but think win-win.
00:18:57.885 --> 00:19:27.666
So in this sense of win-win, when these agents negotiate terms and say the vendor says,"These are my terms," your agent says,"This is what I will a-agree to," do you see a like different levels of what an individual or what another contracting party is willing to accept to say, this is the high bar where we'll start-" but this is the minimum that I need to have guaranteed, otherwise I'm not going to-" yeah agree at, at all." So some different variations of this.
00:19:28.885 --> 00:19:29.556
Yes.
00:19:29.635 --> 00:19:38.566
W-what the standard proposes today, in its early days, are five presets, templates of terms today, right?
00:19:38.566 --> 00:19:42.516
Simple, the basic one is called SD Base or essentially service delivery.
00:19:42.516 --> 00:19:46.385
In other words, I transact with you, you transact with me, and we're done.
00:19:47.096 --> 00:19:48.926
You're not capturing any additional data.
00:19:49.066 --> 00:19:51.486
It's like walking into a Trader Joe's and offering cash.
00:19:51.996 --> 00:19:52.226
Yep.
00:19:53.865 --> 00:19:55.536
You have the product, you leave.
00:19:56.236 --> 00:20:02.016
We-- where we are today in the digital world is on the exact opposite extreme.
00:20:02.906 --> 00:20:14.286
You end up on a random website to buy something, and because they put cookie trackers all over their website, they will follow you potentially forever.
00:20:14.526 --> 00:20:17.645
And you never agree to that or assume you agree to it, right?
00:20:18.186 --> 00:20:25.156
And so I think, there's an evolution that will happen and the negotiation process, it'll be interesting to see how it evolves.
00:20:25.516 --> 00:20:30.076
There's active development underway to build those interaction buses.
00:20:30.506 --> 00:20:35.846
But w-we will arrive at a workable equilibrium, and you have to start somewhere.
00:20:37.696 --> 00:20:38.486
Starting somewhere.
00:20:38.716 --> 00:20:41.615
That's probably a good last question before we wrap it up.
00:20:42.066 --> 00:20:47.456
But what do you recommend where should organizations start looking at this?
00:20:47.456 --> 00:20:54.296
Who even in the organization should familiarize themselves with this new standard in- Yeah what are some of the first steps that they should take?
00:20:55.056 --> 00:21:09.336
So y- you can go to the IEEE website and download the standard, which is the IEEE 7012 and probably good reading for an insomniac.
00:21:10.476 --> 00:21:14.246
We have simplified that with a website called myterms.info.
00:21:14.976 --> 00:21:19.226
And that's really for the layperson to understand what's being built.
00:21:19.756 --> 00:21:29.936
The first working tools are emerging, and the plan is to put that links to those,'cause myterms.info is agnostic.
00:21:29.936 --> 00:21:34.176
It's not promotional in any which way except to promote the fact that-
00:21:34.776 --> 00:21:34.855
Yeah
00:21:34.855 --> 00:21:44.375
the individual should have a contract or have more rights on their own identity and data information than they do today.
00:21:46.186 --> 00:21:46.726
Fantastic.
00:21:47.326 --> 00:21:53.186
So what would you say are the key three takeaways that you would want our audience to take away from our conversation today?
00:21:53.186 --> 00:22:04.135
We've covered a lot of ground from contracts- Yeah and consent not equaling contracts to what the standard looks like, where to find it, where this is today, where this is going.
00:22:05.066 --> 00:22:05.836
What should people take away?
00:22:07.086 --> 00:22:10.656
So I think the number one i- is not to obsess about the technology.
00:22:11.426 --> 00:22:26.635
To think about how your real world physical interactions happen in a day-to-day basis and how simple it can be, and why it's become so complex in the digital world, even though it's supposedly convenience.
00:22:27.385 --> 00:22:42.125
Second is to recognize that the terms of service that you inherently agree to aren't enforceable, but you're signing away access to more data than you can imagine.
00:22:42.846 --> 00:22:47.628
And the third, which is my- The ominous aspect of this.
00:22:47.837 --> 00:22:50.208
But the third piece of this is all temporary.
00:22:50.788 --> 00:22:58.758
W-we are in the Precambrian era of technology, we're only two, maybe three decades in.
00:22:59.567 --> 00:23:03.938
And a-as humans, we've conducted commerce for millennia.
00:23:05.557 --> 00:23:24.688
And so there's so much to learn from and bring into digital world to drive equilibrium for not only for those of us who are successfully, living in this world, but those that are gonna come online, the 50% of the world that's still not online yet, and give them a place where they can come with respect.
00:23:26.398 --> 00:23:26.958
Fantastic.
00:23:28.048 --> 00:23:37.178
It was a pleasure learning from you and hearing more about My Terms, hearing about the standards, hearing about what we need to, make agentic commerce real.
00:23:37.688 --> 00:23:45.218
A different aspect of just saying,"Hey, agents can tran- can transact on your behalf," but how do we reconcile this- Yeah and mirror what we have in the physical world?
00:23:45.218 --> 00:23:49.958
And as as always, I en-enjoy talking to you so much and always learn something new.
00:23:50.018 --> 00:23:51.708
So Nitin, thank you so much for your time.
00:23:52.168 --> 00:23:52.307
Yeah.
00:23:52.988 --> 00:23:53.258
Thank you.
00:23:53.258 --> 00:23:56.597
Thank you for having me on and looking forward to continue the conversation.
00:23:57.347 --> 00:23:57.978
Absolutely.
