The Intention Economy Meets AI: Why Your Customers Are About to Become Your Best Partners

Your customers are about to get their own AI agents that negotiate on their behalf. Are you ready to adapt?

Remember when CRM promised to put customers at the center of everything? Doc Searls saw through that years ago. In his 2012 book The Intention Economy, he argued that traditional CRM was fundamentally backward— true customer relationships are managed by the customer, not the other way around.

What if customers could broadcast their intentions directly to the market, and companies competed to fulfill them? Instead of guessing what customers want through data exhaust and predictive analytics, businesses would respond to explicit, actionable signals. “I need X by Y date at Z price point.” The best solution wins.

It’s hard to believe that simple notion, which has existed in the real world for millennia, seemed like a foreign concept in 2012. But when you look around at the wreckage of the surveillance economy, the only logical step forward is one where balance returns between customer and company. Where agency elevates both sides and empowers a new era of value co-creation. On the internet, this world is about to get real.

The Coming AI Agent Revolution

Your customers will soon start to deploy their own AI agents—digital assistants that negotiate on their behalf, research options, and manage relationships with brands. And I’m not talking about chatbots responding to your prompts. These will be autonomous advocates working exclusively for the customer.

Think about what this means. For decades, you’ve had marketing automation, CDP platforms, and sophisticated tech stacks while your customers had... what, spreadsheets and frustration? That power imbalance is ending. Your customer’s agent will soon talk to your systems, compare your offers against competitors in real-time, and switch providers seamlessly if you’re not delivering value. This isn’t a threat to fear—it’s the biggest opportunity in a generation, but only if you start rebuilding your CX strategy around genuine partnership now.

We’re Living Through a Cambrian Explosion

We’re not just seeing customer-side AI agents emerge. We’re witnessing what can only be called a Cambrian explosion in customer experience—that moment in technology history when entirely new interaction forms burst onto the scene all at once.

Customer-side AI agents, voice-first interfaces, spatial computing, ambient experiences—they’re all proliferating simultaneously. Your customers don’t want to pick one. They will want to use their AI agent for routine stuff, message your support team about edge cases, and call when something breaks. And they expect context to flow between all of it seamlessly.

The CX leaders who’ll win aren’t those trying to optimize a single channel. They’re building adaptive systems that flex across this entire diverse ecosystem—systems designed around what customers intend to do, not what you wish they’d do.

All this is coming as we’re getting the infrastructure to make this work.

IEEE P7012: The Standard That Changes Everything

You might not have heard of IEEE P7012 yet (MyTerms), but you will. It’s an emerging standard for machine-readable personal privacy terms—a technical framework that lets customers (and their AI agents) express preferences, permissions, and intentions in a way machines can understand and act on.

This is the turning point Doc was anticipating. P7012 creates a common language and protocol for the intention economy. When your customer’s AI agent can communicate preferences in a standardized format, and your systems can receive and honor those preferences automatically, you’re no longer playing the game of “guess what the customer wants and hope your dark patterns work.”

Instead, you’re having a clear conversation. The customer’s agent says “my human values privacy, wants delivery by Thursday, and will pay a premium for sustainability.” Your systems either respond with a competitive offer or step aside for someone who can.

It sounds simple, but it represents a fundamental power shift—and it’s being baked into technical standards right now.

From Capture to Co-Creation

Let’s be honest about the old playbook. It was about acquisition and retention—capture and hold. You built systems around your operational needs, not theirs. Your metrics rewarded making it hard to leave. Channel strategy meant herding customers toward your lowest-cost touchpoint.

That playbook is dying, and faster than you think.

When customers can easily articulate needs through standards like MyTerms, and when they can instantly evaluate your response across this Cambrian explosion of touchpoints, the winners will be companies that:

• Build open APIs and interfaces that customer agents can actually use

• Deliver genuine value instead of relying on contractual lock-in

• Let customers contribute their preferences, constraints, and contexts in machine-readable ways

• Treat customer data as belonging to the customer—because legally and technically, it increasingly will

• Meet customers wherever they want to engage, not where you prefer

This is co-creation that actually works. Your customer’s agent becomes a real-time product development partner. Your analytics finally capture genuine intent instead of behavioral proxies. Your customers help shape experiences because they can finally express what they need rather than navigating your predetermined journeys.

The Adaptation Challenge (And Opportunity)

Yes, this means rethinking systems built on information asymmetry. Yes, you’ll need to redesign retention metrics. Yes, you’ll earn loyalty daily instead of contractually. And yes, supporting this explosion of touchpoints while maintaining consistency feels daunting.

You gain clear signal on what customers actually want while Eliminating wasteful spend on uninterested prospects. You also gain relationships that built on delivered value, at the same time lower acquisition costs when you respond precisely to expressed intentions. Let’s not forget the long term benefit of a product roadmap informed by actual needs instead of funnel metrics.

The companies struggling most right now? They’re the ones still trying to maintain control. They’re building walls around preferred channels while customers route around them. They’re investing millions in predictive models while customers are ready to just tell them what they want—if only they’d listen.

Your Path Forward

The customer-centric world Doc described isn’t a distant vision anymore. It’ll arrive in waves, and will surprise you on its acceleration.

Start now. Build APIs for customer agents. Explore standards like IEEE P7012. Rethink your data practices around customer data sovereignty. Invest in orchestration that maintains context across touchpoints. Most importantly, shift your mindset from “how do we manage customers” to “how do we become the obvious choice when customers broadcast their needs.”

The companies that thrive will welcome empowered customers with powerful tools. They’ll embrace the Cambrian explosion of interaction modes. They’ll see customer autonomy as opportunity, not loss of control.

Because the future of CX isn’t about better targeting or channel optimization. It’s about being worth choosing, every single day, in whatever way your customer wants to engage.

And that future? It’s closer than you think.