Beyond the Surveillance Bargain: How the Trust Economy Rewrites the Rules of Customer Value

What if the biggest threat to your CRM investment isn’t a competitor — it’s your customer showing up with their own agent, their own data, and their own terms?

For nearly two decades, the Vendor Relationship Management (VRM) community made an argument that most enterprise software vendors dismissed as irrational: what if customers managed their own relationships with businesses, rather than the other way around? What if, instead of a thousand CRM systems each maintaining a fragmented, vendor-curated version of “you,” you maintained your own authoritative record and extended selective access on your terms?

The enterprise world largely ignored this possibility, and instead kept building more invasive data collection methods to fill increasing bigger data lakes, all with the hope of delivering better customer experiences. The imbalances of this data collection framework, however, not only complicated every interaction, but also eroded the very core of successful customer experiences, trust.

The challenge of truly independent customers was as much infrastructure as interest. Customer sovereignty sounds elegant in a manifesto. It sounds impossible when you’re staring down the operational reality of millions of asynchronous, unstructured customer interactions. How do you honor a customer’s stated preferences in real time, at scale, without a human in every loop? You couldn’t. So the surveillance model won by default, not because it was better, but because it was executable and offered short term gains. While the surveillance model provided quick wins, the weight of inaccurate data and inaccurate insights has led to a ‘Customer Experience’ environment that is simply a mess.

As we see the rise of Agentic AI, there’s an opening to reset the relationship.

Personal AI agents change the infrastructure equation entirely. IEEE 7012 MyTerms contracts give customer-side agents a machine-readable language for asserting customer preferences before an interaction even begins. What VRM sketched out philosophically, the agentic layer can now run operationally. The inversion that I wrote about in my last article isn’t just coming, It’s being compiled into executable code.

What “Inversion” Actually Means for Enterprise CX

Let’s be specific about what flips. In the current model, CRM systems are the systems of record. They assume ‘ownership’ in defining who the customer is, what they’ve done, what they’re worth, and how they should be treated. Essentially, the customer is treated as an object in your data model. They have no formal mechanism to contest that representation, update it in real time, or route around it when it doesn’t serve them.

In the inverted model, the customer’s personal AI agent is their system of record. It arrives at every interaction already carrying context — purchase history, stated preferences, communication boundaries, even negotiating parameters. Your CRM becomes a participant in a conversation your customer’s agent is already running, not the authority defining that conversation’s terms.

This isn’t a minor UX upgrade. It’s a fundamental shift in who holds the authoritative data asset.

The Bilateral Contract as a CX Primitive

MyTerms in this context is more than a privacy protocol, it is the first technical mechanism for a true, bilateral Customer Experience where value is co-created at every interaction. Traditional service terms are unilateral — a vendor publishes terms, a customer clicks accept or walks away. The relationship is legally asymmetric from day one; however consent isn’t the same as contract.

A MyTerms contract negotiated between a customer agent and a brand’s service layer is a different kind of artifact. It’s a living agreement, machine-enforceable, that defines the conditions under which value exchange happens. It clarifies data use scope, communication frequency, escalation pathways, consent renewal triggers, and that’s just for starters.

For enterprise CX leaders, this reframes the entire concept of a “customer profile.” The profile is no longer something you build about a customer. It’s something the customer’s agent presents to you — with access levels you earn through the quality of your service, not the sophistication of your data collection.

Time to Pay Attention to Customers Intent

Any enterprise platform sitting on a surveillance-based value proposition needs to start asking honest questions. If the data moat is the core differentiator, and customers begin reclaiming that data behind agent-managed contracts, what’s left? The answer has to be service quality, interaction speed, reliability, and the sophistication of what you can actually do for a customer when they show up with full context already loaded.

Interestingly, this should be good news for companies that have always invested in genuine service capability but have been outcompeted by platforms that simply out-collected them on data. The MyTerms inversion levels a playing field that was never level to begin with.

The VRM community, led by Doc Searls, spent twenty years being right too early. The agentic web is making them right on time. For enterprise CX, the strategic question isn’t whether this inversion happens, as the infrastructure is here, the standards are maturing, and the customer motivation is obvious. The question is whether you’re building toward a world where customers choose to engage your systems, or assuming they’ll continue to have no choice.

One of those is a strategy. The other is a countdown.