Personal Agents: The Next Evolution In Customer Relationships
By Ian Gotts, Forbes Councils Member for Forbes Technology Council
Published August 25, 2025, 10:15am EDT
The way we as individuals interact with companies (our "suppliers") is on the brink of a major change, driven by the rise of personal agents. These AI-powered "customer-side agents" are set to revolutionize CRM by shifting control from companies to individuals. This new model moves beyond the limitations of traditional CRM, where companies manage customer relationships based on their own assumptions, which can often lead to frustration and data privacy concerns.
The evolution of agents has been a steady progression, starting with internal-facing agents for organizations, then moving to customer-facing agents and now arriving at personal agents that work on the individual's behalf. This latest shift empowers customers by giving them unprecedented control over their data and their interactions with the companies they engage with.
How They Work
Personal agents operate through a central mobile app that manages all your relationships via secure links to the companies you trust and deal with—car, insurance, health, finance. This app uses a secure, unique ID for authentication that is tied to you but is portable even if you change phones. All of your personal data is managed within this app, giving you a comprehensive profile that you control. The system facilitates direct, secure and auditable communication between your agent and the organization's agent.
Personal agents go far beyond simple password management. They give you control over how your data is used and enable true agent-to-agent interactions, often using protocols like the model context protocol (MCP). Initially, you'll initiate these interactions, like instructing your agent to book a car service. But over time, they could become autonomous, like checking for the optimal time to purchase flights based on price.
Here's how they will work:
Mobile App As Central Hub: You will have a mobile app that manages all their relationships.
Unique ID For Authentication: A secure identity verification system will control access to your personal data. It is tied to you and can be used to connect with multiple companies. And it is portable as mobile phone numbers and devices change.
Centralized Personal Data: All of your personal data will be managed within the app, providing a comprehensive profile controlled by you. You can compile a uniquely comprehensive profile from multiple personal data sources, including via regulation-mandated APIs from digital gatekeepers.
Managing Multiple Company Relationships: The app will handle relationships with numerous companies, going beyond simple password management to control data sharing and interactions. Data sharing connections can be established from within a company's existing page in the app.
Onboarding New Companies: You decide on a new company you work with. For example, you've bought a new car. You add the car company's personal agents to your app and decide what data you need or are happy to share (car VIN, driver's license, address, insurance, etc.).
Agent-To-Agent Communication: The app will facilitate direct communication between the customer's agent and the company's agent, ensuring secure and auditable data exchanges. This is enabled by a data sharing protocol. The customer agent can interact with multiple potential companies simultaneously, with automated buying based on stated requirements.
Power Of Personal Agents
So, why are personal agents so powerful?
They reduce customer effort. With a personal agent, you no longer need to manage interactions with numerous companies one by one, having to log into each company's website and remember passwords. The agent can handle these interactions seamlessly, including logins, because it has trusted links with each company. And unlike a human with limited time and patience, an agent will actively work to get things done without constraints.
They increase trust. All of your personal data is in your app, but you maintain full control over the data you share with each company. This helps eliminate "consent fatigue" and the mistrust that comes with vague privacy policies.
They minimize unwanted communications. The app centralizes all of your notifications and communications within a single app, which drastically reduces spam across your emails, texts and social media.
Benefits For Supplier Organizations
This new model also provides significant benefits for companies:
Improved Data Accuracy: You, as the customer, directly maintain your own data, which gives companies higher-quality and more accurate information. This solves the current problem of companies struggling to maintain accurate first-party data.
Tighter Customer Relationships: By building trust and offering personalized value, companies can increase customer lifetime value (LTV) and reduce attrition rates.
Reduced Costs And Improved Service: Agent self-help can dramatically cut operational costs for companies while making customer service more efficient. DataPal, for instance, estimates a 65% reduction in data maintenance and compliance costs, which translates to a saving of approximately £18 per customer per year.
The power of this approach lies in its extensibility. A personal agent app can be customized and extended for virtually any high-value or long-term customer relationship, including banking, insurance, investments, medical services, property management and travel. It can also serve as a centralized hub for consistently formatted data, such as parsing receipts from various formats (emails, PDFs, images) into a common one for easy expense claims or tax reporting. This promises a future where you are truly in control of your digital interactions and personal data.
The Future Is Nearly Here
The technology is working. The standards and protocols are in place. It needs companies to build the customer side and company-side agents that can talk to each other. And then it needs you, the individual, to get comfortable with the idea of a single mobile app that can operate as your personal agent. For me, the benefits of password management alone make this appealing. But it paves the way for true agent-to-agent workflows.
Source: Forbes - read the article here.