Snippings

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Ultimately the degree of trust we give to our prime AI agent — the one we interact with all day every day — will be a score that is boasted about, contested, shared, and advertised widely. In other domains, like a car or a phone, we take reliability for granted.

AI is so much more complex and personal, unlike other products and services in our lives today,

the trustworthiness of AI agents will be crucial and an ongoing concern. Its trust quotient (TQ) may be more important than its intelligence quotient (IQ). Picking and retaining agents with high TQ will be very much like hiring and keeping key human employees.

From: The Technium: The Trust Quotient (TQ).

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Public-opinion research commissioned by the Tony Blair Institute for Global Change (TBI), published for the first time in this paper, shows that digital ID enjoys majority support among the British public, with 62 per cent in favour and just 19 per cent opposed.

From: Time for Digital ID: A New Consensus for a State That Works.

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Meta will be required to put in place measures to address scam advertisements, accounts, profiles and business pages impersonating key government office holders on Facebook as part of enhanced measures by the government against such scams.

From: Singapore to order Meta to curb Facebook impersonation scams in first such directive – CNA.

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Hyperliquid holds about $5.97 billion in USDC balances, equal to roughly 8.2% of USDC’s total supply. Based on current federal funds rates, those deposits would generate more than $250 million annually in interest income for Circle and its partner Coinbase. USDH is designed to redirect that yield into Hyperliquid’s own ecosystem. If adoption succeeds, Circle could lose a substantial revenue stream while Hyperliquid strengthens its independence from external providers.

From: Hyperliquid Turns Up The HYPE —And The Heat On Circle’s USDC.

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International payments group Swift is creating its own blockchain in order to facilitate transactions between global banks, as it seeks to compete with the growing stablecoin industry.

Swift said on Monday that it would work with Bank of America, Citigroup and NatWest, among other banks, to create a shared digital ledger that would be used to facilitate transactions in tokenised products including stablecoins.

Swift said the move would improve cross-border transactions and that the blockchain would allow it to “record, sequence and validate transactions and enforce rules through smart contracts”.

From: Swift to launch blockchain in response to rise of stablecoins.

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Mr Birch said he was keen to distinguish the difference between his support for an improved digital ID infrastructure and a digital ID card.

From: ‘Intrusive’ digital ID cards were a flop 15 years ago – so what’s changed? | The Independent.

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What the machine customers from each phase have in common is that they will make decisions differently from humans in three ways. These differences have significant commercial and operational impacts:
They are transparent — to a point. Machines are logic- and rule-based. Their motivation is to solve a problem. Their assumptions will be visible in their rules and queries as well as the decisions they make. Humans often keep their intentions hidden during the buying process. Machines can’t have a “poker face” in the traditional sense. They will focus on solving a problem, but how they do it may not be clear, especially when complicated algorithms are involved. In these instances, the opacity surrounding how the machine makes decisions can be an issue and has caught the attention of regulators that are enforcing accountability measures.
They can process large amounts of information to make a decision. With that ability, they will carefully collect and weigh the data to make an informed choice without being influenced by emotion.
They don’t need to be delighted. Machines focus on completing tasks efficiently. You can’t wine and dine a machine to win its loyalty, and you don’t need to. It’s more likely to commit to a supplier if the sales and fulfillment process works smoothly and simply meets the requirements of the service-level agreement.

From: Machine Customers Will Decide Who Gets Their Trillion-Dollar Business.

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In 2019, I wrote in Wired magazine that the real revolution in banking would be when customers got AI, not when banks got AI. I stand by that prediction and when I see the energy going into the agentic commerce, and therefore agentic payments, space I begin to think that, if anything, I was underhyping the impact.

In 2020, Cathy Hackl wrote that “marketing is about to change, and marketeers will needed to add business-to-robot-to-consumer (B2R2C) to their duties”.

In 2022, Gartner surveyed executives and found that they believed that by 2030, a quarter of consumer purchases would be “substantially delegated” to bots, suggesting a market shift roughly twice as large and twice as fast as the historical arrival of e-commerce. That too may have seemed a trifle hyperbolic at the time.

In 2023, the Alan Turing Institute in the UK published a paper on “The AI Revolution: Opportunities and Challenges for the Finance Sector”, which higlighted the information asymmetry between financial institutions and individuals and noted that it can be attacked using “digital financAI to enable individuals to access credit, save money, make deposits, withdraw, transfer, and pay for goods and services using a mobile device with AI intelligence.

In 2024

In 2025

Well, we’re not out of 2025 yet and we’ve already seen the 

A2P

AGP

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Machine customers represent the biggest new growth opportunity of the decade, but they don’t make decisions the way humans do. As more increasingly smart devices are connected to the internet and more people use intelligent virtual assistants such as Siri and Cortana, the commercial possibilities are staggering. Trillions of dollars will progressively slide into the hands — or should we say processors — of nonhumans.

From: Machine Customers Will Decide Who Gets Their Trillion-Dollar Business.

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As of 2024, 96% of the UK population were mobile phone users,

From: UK Mobile Phone Statistics 2025 – Stats Report – Uswitch.

There is as you would expect a variation in mobile phone use across the age groups. Penetration is 100% in the 16-24 age group but only around 75% in the 65+ age group. Even if penetration were effectively total, there would of course still be a need to provide services to the small number of people who cannot use phones because of (for example) disability or who simply cannot afford to pay for one.