AI Agents and the Future of Customer Service

Mark Smith: 0:01
Welcome to the Ecosystem Show. We're thrilled to have you with us here. We challenge traditional mindsets and explore innovative approaches to maximizing the value of your software estate. We don't expect you to agree with everything. Challenge us, share your thoughts and let's grow together. Now let's dive in it's showtime. Welcome back to the Ecosystems podcast. Glad to have you with us. Sorry, it's not Ecosystems podcast. Ecosystems show it's the Ecosystems show.

Mark Smith: 0:31
Yeah, yes, because YouTube prefer to call them shows rather than podcasts, because they feel like a show is video, includes video, and this is what this does.

Andrew Welch : 0:42
And who wouldn't want to see our charming faces?

Mark Smith: 0:43
Exactly, exactly, exactly, includes video, and this is what this does. And who wouldn't want to see our charming faces? Exactly, exactly exactly, um, even my especially, especially now?

Andrew Welch : 0:51
that I'm, I'm back from, I'm back from from, um, uh, causing an airplane, an emergency diversion of an airplane. So, uh, I'm, I'm, wow, I'm looking well, if I do say so myself.

Mark Smith: 1:03
So you, you, you on an air, on a on a flight, caused an emergency situation that had to divert and landed an airport.

Andrew Welch : 1:12
Yes, yes, wow, which I mean. It's not like. It's not like. It wasn't a goal, it wasn't a goal of mine and I was not part of. I was barely conscious, I was not part of the decision-making process.

Mark Smith: 1:24
Yeah, wow, wow, yeah, wow, wow. So medical instance eh.

Andrew Welch : 1:27
Yes, yes, it was not the most fun I've ever had on a plane.

Mark Smith: 1:33
I bet I bet Frightening really, but glad everything pulled through and you're okay. That's the good outcome of this. As you can see, there's only the two of us today. Our three colleagues weren't able to join us, but I'm sure they'll be back in the future.

Andrew Welch : 1:51
Not too long Is Will back in Scotland. That's just where we say Will is when he's missing.

Mark Smith: 1:58
Right, right, I assume he's back in his manor.

Andrew Welch : 2:06
Do you remember when we did the show, kim, and we, for whatever reason, we recorded two episodes back to back on the same night, on the same day, and Will, not wanting it to appear that we had recorded them back to back, the rest of us just went and changed our clothes. Will took down the thing, the art on his wall, and swapped it out, and swapped it for different art. And when we talk about the art on Will's wall, what was it like? A red cow head, yeah.

Andrew Welch : 2:38
Hanging like he had shot a cow or something like that.

Mark Smith: 2:41
It's what I would call eclectic art, right? Eclectic, I think, is the phrase that you would use for his artwork of choice. So I don't know. Just lately, oh, I tell you what a little personal story Today. In what's the time now? In my time it is eight, a bit after eight in the morning, at one o'clock. Today I will have my first food that I haven't eaten for seven days.

Andrew Welch : 3:18
So you did it, huh.

Mark Smith: 3:20
I've done it. Yeah, Water only seven days. Dropped about five kgs in seven days.

Andrew Welch : 3:27
As an American, I don't know how much that is.

Mark Smith: 3:29
Yeah, sorry, I don't know what it is.

Andrew Welch : 3:31
I guess that's good. I guess it's good.

Mark Smith: 3:33
Let me just do the conversion. I think it's about two and a half kilograms to the pound. It is 11.2 pounds. There you go, there you go, good job.2 pounds. There you go, there you go, good job. 11 pounds, nice one um.

Andrew Welch : 3:53
So yeah, I'm looking forward to my first meal.

Mark Smith: 3:54
What? What's it gonna be an apple?

Andrew Welch : 3:58
not a, not a cheeseburger or something. It's gonna be an apple.

Mark Smith: 4:01
No, no, no, no, no, no, because you gotta, you gotta. You know your body's gone, like your stomach particularly is, you know, uh has been operating for seven days as such, apart from you know detoxing. That's wild, and so yeah, well, actually I'll take a banana first, I'll wait about an hour, and then I'll have an apple, and I'll probably wait another hour and then I'll have a chicken and vegetable soup, and that just so your system can turn back on without you know blowing it out, type thing.

Andrew Welch : 4:31
So is this the first time that you've done this?

Mark Smith: 4:34
No, I've done seven days. So it's 10 years ago when I did my last seven day fast. And then, as I, when I say fast, that for me, um, the way my brain runs is, I am very. It has to be no food whatsoever, no coffee, nothing, no liquid outside of water. So it's a water only fast. And in my past, about 19, 20 years ago, in one year, I did two 21-day fasts in one year. That's wild, that. What's wild? Water only um the first time I did a seven day fast, which is prior to that again, I was working, still full-time, and I was in kind of manual labor role, yet I was still able.

Mark Smith: 5:21
Your body's amazing and what it can achieve and do and stuff, especially when you go over the about the three-day marking for males and and um, the difference between males and female fasting are worlds apart. There's no correlation or similarity that that you can do so. For example, the rule of thumb for females is that they should never fast the week prior to their period at all at all. It will just be because this is and it's interesting, I've learned you know, guys pretty much have one hormone as such, testosterone, running through the systems, um, where women have um, estrogen, testosterone and progesterone, I think the other one is um, and so fasting can really fuck up their hormones massively. So there's there's nowhere near the amount of studies done on female fasting as there are on males.

Mark Smith: 6:14
Interesting, yeah, I crazy thing. I haven't felt hungry at all. Not not once. Not once have I thought, oh, I should have a craving or anything like that. And I think it's because for the last six months I've been doing intermittent fasting, which is seven days a week. I only eat after 12, um in the day and before eight, and at 8 pm at night I stop eating. So a 16 by 8, what that? What that's referred to, and so I think it made. This is probably the easiest fast I've had to do from a no kind of, you know, cravings or anything like that. It's been amazing awesome.

Andrew Welch : 6:53
Well, you, the the ecosystem show, come for the uh, come for the tech and stay for the armchair, medical or nutrition advice. Just just testimony, testimony right mark's experience is not an indicator or a recommendation, so it's uh yeah, so exactly, you know, as I say, do your research, do your research, do your research.

Mark Smith: 7:17
So, um, I tell you what one word has been popping up everywhere at the moment for me and of course that means I'm kind of focusing on a new area and that word is agentic. So I had to understand what does this word mean, agentic and um? It's basically like. Actually, I'll read you the definition um from chat gpt um. It refers to being agent, like or having the characteristics of an agent. In a philosophical context, it often describes an individual's capacity to act independently and make their own free choices. In terms of ai and technology, it describes systems or processes that can act autonomously or make decisions without human intervention, effectively mimicking human agency. What do you think about this?

Andrew Welch : 8:11
Well, you know so. So a couple of thoughts. One, um, for some reason this fired in my brain when you were reading this, right, but you know, when you um, uh, we've had we, we humans, have had other humans acting as our agent for a long time, right, so people of a people of a certain age will remember the travel agent you know, remember that was, that was the only way you could book a flight for a very long time. Right, you had you had to call a travel agent because only they had the you know weird, uh, command line terminal that they could go book you a flight.

Mark Smith: 8:53
Galileo, I think, was their, their, their back-end system is two. There's galileo, and I forget the other one, which is still the way all flights happen around the world is still in those two Amadeus and Sabre. Yes, there's three.

Andrew Welch : 9:06
Yes and well, and those were Amadeus and Sabre are, like you said, those are two, I know, still used by almost every airline on the planet to manage their flight operations, right? But so, anyway, you would have these travel agents and a human would hire a travel agent to act on their behalf to go book them, to go book them a flight. Or, if you are, we said, people of a certain age, well, people of a certain level of wealth and fame might hire an agent to represent them in a contract negotiation, say a sports agent or a talent agent, or you know what have you. So, you know, it's a kind of like co-pilot, right? We've taken this word that has real meaning in human to human contexts and we've grafted it onto this paradigm of artificial intelligence. And it's, it's, it's, you know, it's similar to how Windows, you know, we called, we called it Windows.

Andrew Welch : 10:09
or, you know, desktop operating systems have always had this metaphor of the folder and the desktop itself you know so so in some ways it's really just, you know, it's using concepts that are familiar as a way to describe what's happening in AI. So that was a completely in the moment thought that I had when you were reading that definition.

Mark Smith: 10:34
Yeah, it's so valid and I think that I think by Q1 next year, I think this whole concept of agents is really going to sink in for people, and I don't know if you saw the announcements this week from um uh open ai, but they brought out real-time voice-to-voice um apis and yeah, it did.

Mark Smith: 11:00
And you know what? What's totally epic about this, you literally will be able to create an agent that is your outbound calling agent and so, let's say, your airline mucks things up or whatever. You'll be able to say to your agent hey, can you put a call in and make a claim or do whatever. They'll call up that contact center as a human level voice. They will not be able to tell the difference and say, hey, listen, this is about my flight, here's my date, like they'll have all your details that you've given it. And when they go, oh no, sorry, we can't do anything about it, they'll refer to policy 5963 on their website and go well, according to your policy, here it says you, like they'll have all that detail, like we would never bother going and reading all that stuff, right?

Andrew Welch : 11:46
first of all, I just I've been having the weirdest feud with the, with my, with our property management company that we're you know we pay service fees to like condo fees. They have taken, uh, they, they took, uh, I'll you the details, but five months ago I spoke with them about solving a problem that they themselves have created and they finally got back to me yesterday and, lo and behold, they needed five months to actually make the problem worse.

Mark Smith: 12:17
So I would love property management cable companies all of these hated industries right To just have an agent that calls and deals with them for me, and you know, and that agent has it, understands all the laws, the bylaws of your area, like how you can get action from them, and like the detail. And so you imagine that operator on the line, man, they're just going to not know what hits them. All of a sudden, these very knowledgeable people are calling in agents.

Andrew Welch : 12:47
No, all of a sudden, all of a sudden, the airline or the property management company, they're going to have their own agent and it's just two agents are going to duke it out. It's going to be like the weirdest, the weirdest pub trivia you've had, you know, like when two nerds get together and argue about the minute details of a problem.

Mark Smith: 13:07
I actually think that will get to a solution quicker, right? Because what happens, right is that human nature is kick the can down the road, right? You got a problem Like I don't know if you've noticed, in the airlines, and particularly was prevalent when I was flying Virgin Australia and, you know, frequently in Australia. And so you'd go to the check-in desk and say, listen, can I upgrade my seat to XYZ? And they're like, oh, I'll go and ask in the lounge. They'll do that. So you go to the lounge, yeah, can you upgrade your seat? Oh, listen, when you go on the aircraft, ask the person that when you're boarding the aircraft and what they do is this kick down, like I'm not going to say no to you, but I'm going to kick it down. And it's the next person in the chain.

Mark Smith: 13:51
and of course you get there and they're like, oh no, they should have done that for you back at the service desk and it's too late, right and it's like but the thing is, I think if you have this agentent interaction and their goal is a solution, they're not going to do any of that kicking the can down the road. They will. Hey, yes, you know the policy, I know the policy. We're going to do this. Bang Solved. I think it'll strip out all that crap.

Andrew Welch : 14:56
Yeah, you know, but I think it'll be very interesting to see how, in this and I want to, in, I do, I want to, I want to lose track of, kind of talking about how, the, how early days of these announcements that we've seen over the last, you know, month or so have have gone and you know how I, how we think they're playing. But before we get there, I do, I do think that it'll be interesting to see how the personalities of the humans to whom the agents are accountable, basically like the personalities of their creators or the personalities of their masters, what happens there? Right, and I'll give you, I'll give you, I'll give you a scenario. Right, there are, there are plenty of people in the world who you know, you are definitely one of them. You know, I have things, we all listen, we all have things that we really, we do want to control, right, like, for me, my, my weakness are slides. Right, I don't know one, I don't like anyone else's slides, but for the most part, I am very happy to delegate something.

Andrew Welch : 16:01
You know, if I think back, you know, if I think of my experience as as a manager and a supervisor of people in the workplace, right, the people who I work best with have always been you know, as a, you know as direct reports of mine have always been people who are super autonomous, super willing to sort of go do their own thing, because I am perfectly happy for my team to go do their own thing. Yeah, I really just care sort of about the result at the end and whether or not you've acted, you know, like a decent human being in order to get there. But I don't, I don't care where you are, I don't care what you do with your time, I don't care how you do. You know, I mean, I don't care about most of those things, but I think that there is a whole. So for me, the idea of turning an agent loose to go deal with things and to be autonomous in that way and to report back to me and to come back to me with the result, and then we'll decide if we like the result.

Andrew Welch : 17:15
Personality type that is going to be very uncomfortable with the idea of turning someone loose, whether it's an AI agent or a human agent, turning someone loose to go do the thing for them or on their behalf, and then add into that the layer of what if you are dissatisfied? What if the human master is dissatisfied with the outcome that the agent has produced? Right? So the airline's agent and your agent have added about the policy and they come to a conclusion. Well, is the human.

Andrew Welch : 17:42
If the human doesn't get the result they're looking for, are they going to be pissed? And I think the answer is yes.

Mark Smith: 17:48
So here's the, here's the thing, and this, this comes, I don't know to a degree, to a maturity level in understanding the value of time. Right, and one of the modern-day philosophers I follow is a gentleman I can't remember his name, it's a very multi-long name, nivelle I think he goes by as his handle In fact that's his first name, neville and and what he says is that he worked up early on in his life the concept of money and time and how they interrelate so he said if it's going to take me two hours to go to a mall and buy something, but I could buy that online and have it shipped to my door, no brainer.

Mark Smith: 18:37

Even if there's a career fee, no brainer. Right, and he go. He looked at every area of his life and said is the? He said like, let's say he go, has a product that fails and he realizes the time to get it corrected even he could get corrected is going to take out of his life, is going to be more than what he values. That product He'll like oh well, let it go. Yeah, who cares? Who cares? Because I value my time more importantly than my bank account. I have the funds to do it. I'd rather pay for it to be done.

Mark Smith: 19:08
And he and he talked about his relationship with his mother and stuff, where she would ask him to do stuff and he would just get someone else to do it and pay them because it was a good use of his time. It was just, and I think that that's what that's going to come back to. Is that for me, like? I'm like, bring it on, because, whatever the answer is, I'm happy. I just didn't have to go through the process and stress and argument with somebody on a phone call to get the outcome that I am seeking is that? What if the airline said to their agent programming listen, make sure you do everything you can to not pay out. Right, you need to use tactics of deflection and avoidance and ambiguity and stuff Like the Talco in New Zealand Spark. They got a law case against them because they made their pricing so confusing on purpose to deceive the customers over time. It was.

Mark Smith: 20:05
It was brought to the commission and they were found that they tactfully went out of their way to screw customers over on purpose, so it's ryanair, but as an electricity was it an electricity company telecom telecom a telecom, a telco so it was equivalent, equivalent to British Telecom, the same entity Government, originally government loan telecommunication became privatized and then went through this process of doing everything to screw their customers over, knowing they had no choice, there's nobody else they could go to.

Andrew Welch : 20:38
Long-time listeners or repeat listeners of the podcast will will, of course, appreciate that the eco or the show, the ecosystem show, takes a long running position that Ryanair is the worst company on the planet. So just just so we can get as we can get, that out there again, um classic classic, the worst, the worst so back to agents right now.

Mark Smith: 21:03

Like I got chat gpt yesterday to make me a 40 hour course to go deep into agents and learn it and understand it and chat gpt make a course for you yeah, and like it, gives me, it goes out and does all the research and says I recommend you know, uh, you know, on monday in the morning, you, you're going to spend four hours, you're going to get hands-on, and I've got it doing it. I said I don't want just a single view of this. I don't want just Microsoft's view, I don't want just OpenAI's view, I want AWS's, I want Google's as well in that mix. And cheers, cheers. I hope to have one of those later today.

Andrew Welch : 21:45
And it will allow. Well, it is 8.30 at night on my end, Exactly exactly. We're 12 hours separate here.

Mark Smith: 21:51
I understand. So yeah, going deep on that Now. Another thing announcement made this morning by OpenAI which I find intriguing is they brought out this idea of ChatGPT Canvas.

Andrew Welch : 22:07
So is that like co-pilot pages? It's identical. It's almost like. When I saw the interface I'm like it's identical.

Mark Smith: 22:12
This is. I was like what the fuck?

Andrew Welch : 22:13
it's identical so I'm currently I am currently super annoyed with my co-pilot. So so the background, the background on this is that, um, we uh, several weeks back we started basically the cloud lighthouse policy. The company policy for whether you get a co-pilot for M three 65 license is if you ask for one and you shall have. So Mark has not asked for his yet, so he does not have one, correct. So anyway, I have one. But when I saw the co-pilot pages announcement a few weeks back, I thought to myself, because this is probably something that you and I should unpack the different ways that you and I use or look at AI in our personal, like in our own individual work life. Right, but so anyway, I saw this announcement for Copilot Pages and I thought now that that is useful. It's not earth shattering.

Andrew Welch : 23:14
It's not groundbreaking, but it's it's. It's massively useful and I cannot. So I cannot get it to appear in the Cloud Lighthouse tenant. And what annoys me right now is that I have asked Copilot how to make Copilot pages appear and it is not aware. It's not aware that that capability has not yet been offered to me.

Mark Smith: 23:38
It's just the rollout ring right. It started mid-September. The US tenants would have got it first up, you know, in specific areas, and then it'll be their high usage, you know, customers.

Andrew Welch : 23:50
We're a US northeast.

Mark Smith: 23:52
But do you have 100,000 users?

Andrew Welch : 23:55
in your tenant? No, we are.

Mark Smith: 23:58
Microsoft got customers of that size on Copilot right, so I think it's those ones that probably get it first and then rolls out to ultimately the rats and mice and stuff. That are just two or three licenses around the world.

Andrew Welch : 24:12
But I tell you what Eventually, Microsoft's most valued partner will get the feature.

Mark Smith: 24:17
Exactly exactly. So I find this intriguing and my question that jumps to mind is did Microsoft do a deal with OpenAI? Because when I look at the conversation thread, they've been working on this for about two years. Did Microsoft have a deal with OpenAI that they obviously will know way before the public about feature development and stuff based on their relationship, did they do a thing and said, hey, can we announce ours first and get that feature and we'll build on it and we'll put the, the Microsoft skin over the top, which, remember, satya, in his keynote, calls this UI for AI, which is a really, really it's this.

Mark Smith: 25:04
Then, this week, once again, I've been doing a bunch of work in this space and it's really blowing my mind up large what ui for ai really means. Because I was doing some research and I googled a service now, um, sap, oracle, you know the Oracle's HR system, sap's HR system, workday Salesforce, maybe one other and I searched for what was there. So first I did a prompt that asked for what were the names of the AI tools that they had for each of those brands. It came back and then I searched those up, looking just for screenshots of their interfaces right Of their chat. So I ended up with a on a PowerPoint slide with maybe six of these different things.

Mark Smith: 25:58
The problem with each product producing its own chat experience like this is that employees in the organization that are already overwhelmed by the 50 apps that they have to use each day have now got 50 different AI tools to interact just with the data inside that data set. It's not holistic. You want to have an interface that goes across all your data sets because this data set in this system might correlate to another data set in another system. But the model that all these point solutions have gone for is no, it's just about my data set, and I think that Microsoft has made an incredible tweak in in what sachia said there.

Mark Smith: 26:46
Uh, the ui for ai is going to be so important because I think what's going to happen is in business, people are going to want one chat interface agent to their data on their desktop. They don't want 50 of them, right? Oh shit, that's in that system and it like well, you're just going to do context switching, app switching, just like we've been doing for years. With this model from Microsoft, you can use Copilot Studio, connect into all those data sets across your organization the workday, the service, now the whatever and when you prompt, you're going to have that context window across your entire data estate, and I think that was probably one of the smartest moves Microsoft have just made in their Wave 2 update.

Andrew Welch : 27:40
So I have lots of thoughts on this topic. Let me see if I can quickly share them in the time it takes for me to not forget what they are. Yes, so first of all, I have been surprised over the last gosh. Are we at two years now?

Mark Smith: 28:01
Yeah, nearly two years November, it'll be two years. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Two years November, it'll be two years yeah.

Andrew Welch : 28:05
Chat, gpt Right. So so, for all of the advancements that we have made in the technology over the last two years, I have been very surprised at the kind of the stagnation of the user experience Right.

Andrew Welch : 28:22
Like and I still very much believe, right? You know, and anyone who's read my white papers or in blogs on this topic know that, and comparison that I like to use is that when the iPhone came out, for a few years, developers spent a couple of years trying to cram desktop applications into a smaller screen before realizing that the iPhone was a fundamentally different form factor and suited for different things. And then the same thing happened with the watch right. For the first couple of years after the apple watch came out, we had these iphone apps that were just like really, really teeny, tiny, tiny apps on our phone to use, right, right. So I'm very confident that we're going to see the world, the global developer community and user experience, designers, et cetera, et cetera. We're going to land on the UI for AI and we're going to probably have several right. This is not just like a one device type of thing, but I am surprised that it's taken so long.

Mark Smith: 29:30
Yeah, but I think any UI has to be multimodal by default. Yes, right, just as a given.

Andrew Welch : 30:07
Yeah. So I think that that definitely is. One just observation is that I am surprised that the technology, the vendors of the companies making this technology and you know there are thousands and tens of thousands of software companies that are doing things let's focus on, um, let's focus on four of them, on the big four, and I'm going to set meta, facebook aside, because facebook and meta are such a fundamentally different proposition than microsoft, apple, google or or Alphabet and Amazon. Okay, yeah, yeah. So I think that the companies, so you basically have two ends of a spectrum here, at which one end you've always had sort of this best of breed philosophy, and I'm going to be generous and call it a philosophy that Salesforce, amazon, the Googles of the world have had. You know, like you should get G Suite or whatever it's called now, like Google for your office productivity, and you should get Amazon for your cloud infrastructure. You should get Salesforce for your business, you know, for your CRM or whatever, and you should piece all these things together right in a way that you know for your CRM or whatever, and you should piece all these things together right In a way that you know lets you use what they would argue the best of breed, and then on the other end of the spectrum, you have the Apple and the Microsoft approach, right, apple and Microsoft, of course, being the adults in the room that you know they've been around the longest, they're the most mature, they have kind of the best end to end, in my opinion, offering in their particular space, and I think that it is the two technologies that I'm the most you know that I think are very interesting in terms of making the first crack at this user experience thing are Copilot from Microsoft and Apple Intelligence from Apple, which hasn't even been released yet.

Andrew Welch : 32:07
And the reason I'm so interested in where Copilot and Apple Intelligence go over the next couple of years on this issue is because Apple and Microsoft are really the only two companies that have as far reaching a device and or software and or data ecosystem to be able to create that one window to artificial intelligence across all of your data. It simply is not within the realm of something that Google or Salesforce or Amazon and certainly Meta are even able to produce. So it'll be really interesting to see where Apple and Microsoft take this.

Mark Smith: 32:49
Yeah, see, for me, I feel that Apple is going to have my personal data right and it'll have agency across my personal data, and then Microsoft will have agency across my business data. That's the kind of the view I take of it.

Andrew Welch : 33:06
I mean so, says so, probably would agree all of the many, many, many, many, many of us who have been rolling around with Outlook installed on their iPhone for years, ever since what was it? It was circa? It was around 2013 when Microsoft acquired Sunrise. It was Sunrise Calendar, which was a great calendar app, turned it into Outlook. So yeah, no, I mean for sure, for sure.

Mark Smith: 33:36
Yeah, I just think it's going to be incredibly interesting times in that you know, this concept of agents is so far reaching and how. You know if you I've thought about it from a home automation perspective and and having it intelligent enough to know temperatures, know the lighting conditions and adjusting everything just automatically. Based on that, knowing that, you know, I've noticed that every monday you normally do your grocery order and have it delivered. You skipped it this Monday, but I know that you'll be annoyed later in the week that you didn't do it, so I'll just order it for you. I know all the favorite products and stuff you want and all of a sudden the truck arrives outside and I'm like fantastic.

Andrew Welch : 34:24
Well, how fabulous will be. Think of the quality, think of the quality, the improvement in the quality of the modern marriage, if only that, if only that use case can come to fruition well, and then you take that a step further.

Mark Smith: 34:40
Right, I saw this week a tiktoker from australia where a guy has basically created a free chrome extension.

Mark Smith: 34:48
And there's there's two main shopping brands in australia they're coles and they're woolworths.

Mark Smith: 34:53
For your grocery shopping, those are the two brands.

Mark Smith: 34:56
And what he did is that, before he announced this, he plotted for six months the price point on night, the like the 80 of products that people buy as staples every day in their life. And what he noticed is that there was this whole cyclical price that then would get discounted a week later and it was kind of like this wave effect of the price in this week it's discounted, the price in this week it's discounted, and this is for not perishable foods, but your hand wash, your laundry detergents and stuff like this. And so he then started monitoring across both brands and he noticed that there was an offset If you took the exact same product from two different stores, they would offset their discounting cycles between each other on this weekly scale. And so what he did is that this chrome extension allows you to go in and it can for any product you click on. It shows you the price point today and what it was last week and what it was the week before and the week before. You can see this plotted graph underneath and you can decide.

Mark Smith: 36:04
You know what laundry detergent this week? It's 50 off. I'm going to buy two lots of it you know to do the next two weeks, because I know it'll be on discount again in two weeks time based on the pattern that is shown in the past.

Andrew Welch : 36:17
Now you add that into the agent system an agent that can extract, that can extrapolate and interpret that data without the mental load of sitting around pondering you?

Mark Smith: 36:28
don't have to worry about it, it just handles it for you. Now here's another thing. Another Australian TikToker I follow. He is, and he's always helping you bring your household expenditure down. And what he noticed? He went down to get to the chemist to buy five products from the chemist I forget what they were and he has this app that scans a barcode and it said, oh, it's this price at this store, this store, this store. And once again he found a 50% variance for any scanned product.

Andrew Welch : 36:59
Fascinating.

Mark Smith: 36:59
And he goes. This is amazing, like you. Now you hand that to an agent, right? Who's going to go? You know what I can order it, including the courier fees, etc. It's going to be cheaper to order it from. You know the online store of X, y or Z man, I tell you, I reckon e-commerce is going to go through the roof online buying of anything because it's going to find the best optimized deal price point for you and it'll purchase from there rather than your store of choice.

Andrew Welch : 37:31
Mm. Hmm, yeah, point for you, and it'll purchase from there rather than your store of choice. Yeah, now, now let's um. So I think in a future episode I would sorry. What were you saying?

Mark Smith: 37:35
mark. I was gonna say customer loyalty will will be dead going forward, it'll kill customer loyalty um or customer perceived loyalty. You know that these programs try to induce you into yeah well, I think it'll kill.

Andrew Welch : 37:51
I think it's likely to. I don't think it'll kill. I know you love to say that things are dead. Customer loyalty programs probably across the board, but no more. No no industry more so than in highly commoditized industries right Like air travel.

Andrew Welch : 38:16
I actually don't think that air travel is nearly is is as highly commoditized, because air travel is air travel is is. First of all, it's very specific. It can be very specific to where you live, right to specific markets, totally to there. Really, there really really are benefits as someone who flies a lot, there are in, you know, huge. There can be huge benefits to sort of concentrating your miles, earning your points, earning in in an airline alliance, for example but what?

Mark Smith: 38:51
what happened if your agent knew that, knew all the data of all the others, knew everything about how you could optimize a flight and like because I see on you know some folks online they know that whatever airline sometimes you can buy points and stuff right and and status credits and stuff like that, and it knows the price, like it could work all that stuff out and go. Hey, by the way, this month they've got this deal. If you go there, it means the next five flights you're going to do you're going to be business all the way because it's going to be so economical to do it. I think it's amazing. I can't wait to you know.

Andrew Welch : 39:28
So it's going to cause, it's going, this is going to cause, I think, significant changes in the patterns of customer loyalty and in the way that brands attract and retain that loyalty over time. The more commoditized it is Right. So like if I can buy a bottle of my favorite dish washing detergent and.

Andrew Welch : 39:50
I live in the UK, so at Tesco or at Sainsbury's, you know what I mean Like, like. So those really where the same brand is available for multiple retail providers. That's, I think you loyalty to those retail, those retail outlets, is out the window, to those retail, those retail outlets, is out the window. You know, I think that you know, probably you've got. You know, I really love the clothing brand Ascot. They're a Swedish brand and I just love the t-shirts. I love the t-shirts, I love the, the, the button down shirt, I just love them, right. But you only get them from that store, my Allbirds. You only get Allbirds shoes from Allbirds, right. So those sorts of those integrated, those integrated manufacturing, distribution and retail outlets are probably going to fare better. But you know they're, they're under, they're under pressure right now for a whole host of other reasons. So but?

Mark Smith: 40:46
but you think, imagine your agent knows the style that you're into and it discovers because it's out there researching all the time the optimal shirt that you like and it finds five other brands yeah that allow you a bit of um uh diversity in in what you're wearing, but they're on point as to what you like to wear and you would never have gone out of your way to look at that because you're wearing, but they're on point as to what you like to wear and you would never have gone out of your way to look at that because you're happy with where you are.

Mark Smith: 41:11
But all of a sudden now you're exposed to new and oh my gosh. So I think, even like, take Allbirds as an example, you know what, if there are three others that kind of suited a similar style, but understood your personality type, I just think it's still gonna open up. I think the one thing that will where loyalty will still stay is a good coffee shop and a good um, a you know a great, a great restaurant, a great wine bar, a great you know, cocktail, like I don't think those will go away in a hurry, like I think these other things I think will transform very, very rapidly. The other thing I think in 2025 people are going to realize how much ai, the need for them to get on board and understand and work with ai, as in much more in the population broadly outside of tech yeah, yeah, you know so.

Andrew Welch : 42:03
So I and I know we're, we're almost at time here, but there's a few themes, topics that I think would be really interesting to pick up on in a future episode. So one is and I alluded to this earlier your and my, the different ways and the different perspectives that you and I have on how we've integrated, or maybe not integrated, ai into our daily life and work. I think that's a really interesting topic. I would like to pick up on how this you know, agentification and this idea of agents has been rolled out and received over the last month, couple of months or so. I think that's interesting, or so I think that's interesting, and I also think that it's really interesting to think a little bit about how you know what this means. You know what agents mean from a regulatory perspective and how governments are going to deal with accountability.

Andrew Welch : 43:00
And I'm thinking about that example that you cited I forget who it was where you know, basically, the, the, what was it? The? The, the telco had instructed um, um had had instructed um, uh, the you know folks to to confuse their customers?

Mark Smith: 43:21
Yeah, cause they could drive more revenue. Yeah, it's going to be interesting, cause, I mean, they were litigated against and that was way before AI. This is like 10 years ago. This type of thing happened. So yeah, interesting times, mate. It's been great talking. We're definitely over time, but until next time, ciao, ciao.

Andrew Welch : 43:38
See ya.

Mark Smith: 43:39
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