When Customers Set the Terms: How the Intention Economy and ‘MyTerms’ Enable the Great Unwinding

A technical and economic foundation for customer sovereignty is here

In 2008, Doc Searls articulated a vision that seemed simultaneously obvious and impossible at the time:

“The Intention Economy grows around buyers, not sellers. It leverages the simple fact that buyers are the first source of money, and that they come ready-made. You don’t need advertising to make them.”

Nearly two decades later, we’re approaching the inflection point where this vision becomes operational reality—not through consumer activism or regulatory mandate alone, but through the convergence of AI techniques, including agents and agentic AI, and technical standards that make customer sovereignty practical at scale.

The question is no longer whether the surveillance economy will unwind, but how the technical and economic infrastructure will emerge to support what comes next. Two critical developments are paving this path: the foundational principles of the Intention Economy are becoming more apparent and the technical frameworks are emerging, like the IEEE 7012 standard for machine-readable personal privacy terms.

The Intention Economy: Flipping the Script on Customer Relationships

Doc’s Intention Economy inverts the traditional power dynamic between buyers and sellers. Rather than companies trying to predict customer needs from mysterious behavioral patterns or manipulating customer attention, vendors can respond to actual intentions that customers choose to express. This isn’t about better personalization through surveillance—it’s about creating genuine market efficiency by letting customers signal their needs directly.

The core insight is deceptively simple but profoundly disruptive: customers who can clearly express their intentions create more value for themselves and for businesses than customers who must be tracked, analyzed, and predicted. When I can tell the market “I need a photographer for B-Roll shooting in downtown Munich in the next two hours,” I’ve provided more actionable information than months of behavioral tracking could ever reveal. More importantly, I’ve done so on my terms, with full knowledge and control.

This approach solves the fundamental inefficiency of the attention economy—the massive waste involved in broadcasting messages to audiences who don’t want them, building behavioral profiles that poorly predict actual needs, and creating friction-filled experiences that customers actively try to avoid. The Intention Economy eliminates this waste by enabling direct communication of customer intent.

Why the Unwinding Is Accelerating Now

Three converging forces are making the Intention Economy transition from aspiration to implementation:

AI Agents as Customer Representatives The emergence of AI agents that may act autonomously on behalf of customers fundamentally changes the economics of expressing intent. Previously, customers would need to manually communicate their needs to multiple vendors, compare responses, and negotiate terms—transaction costs that made surveillance-based approaches seem more efficient despite their ineffectiveness.

AI Agents may eliminate these transaction costs. Your AI agent will simultaneously express your intentions to multiple markets, compare responses based on your preferences and constraints, negotiate terms, monitor compliance, and switch providers when better options emerge. This will make customer-expressed intent not just more accurate than behavioral inference, but also more scalable and efficient.

Declining Returns from Surveillance The surveillance economy is collapsing under its own weight. As customers adopt privacy tools, modify their behavior to avoid tracking, and AI agents begin masking customer actions, the signal quality from behavioral surveillance is degrading rapidly. Organizations are investing billions in ever-more-sophisticated analysis of ever-less-reliable data.

Meanwhile, regulatory pressure, compliance costs, and reputational risks associated with data breaches and privacy violations continue to mount. The business case for surveillance-based customer intelligence is deteriorating at precisely the moment when customer-controlled alternatives become practical.

Technical Standards for Customer Terms Perhaps most importantly, we’re moving beyond theoretical frameworks toward practical implementation standards. This is where IEEE 7012 becomes critical piece of the new infrastructure layer.

IEEE 7012: A Technical Component to Customer Sovereignty

IEEE P7012, the Standard for Machine Readable Personal Privacy Terms, provides individuals with means to proffer their own terms respecting personal privacy in ways that can be read, acknowledged, and agreed to by machines operated by others in the networked world. More formally, it enables individuals to operate as first parties in agreements with companies operating as second parties.

This is obvious yet also revolutionary. Currently, customers “agree” to company privacy policies through one-sided consent mechanisms that provide no genuine negotiation, no ability to propose alternative terms, and no practical way to verify compliance. Privacy policies can change on a whim, and there is nothing binding about them anyway. IEEE 7012 inverts this entirely—instead of customers clicking “accept” on company terms, companies respond to customer-proffered terms.

P7012 changes the game by replacing site-by-site consent with a universal, user-controlled contract system, transforming users from being passive consent providers to active participants who publish and control their own data rights.

Imagine arriving at a website where, instead of encountering a consent banner asking you to accept tracking cookies, the site’s systems immediately read your machine-readable privacy terms and either agree to them automatically or propose alternative terms for negotiation. Your AI agent handles this negotiation instantly, either completing the transaction under your specified conditions or moving to an alternative provider who will accept your terms.

How This Creates Co-Created Value

The Intention Economy powered by standards like IEEE 7012 doesn’t just shift power to customers—it creates entirely new forms of value that benefit all participants in the ecosystem:

Reduced Transaction Costs When customers can express intentions clearly and companies can respond efficiently to those intentions, the enormous overhead of the attention economy—advertising spend, behavioral tracking infrastructure, compliance monitoring, customer acquisition costs—will shrink dramatically. These savings can be shared between customers and companies through better prices, better service, or both.

Higher Quality Information Customer-proffered intentions provide dramatically higher signal quality than inferred behavioral data. When I tell you I need a gift for someone starting a new career, you have actionable information that behavioral analysis could never reliably extract. This enables genuinely helpful recommendations rather than algorithmic guesswork.

Trust-Based Relationship Development When companies compete on their ability to respond to customer intentions within customer-specified terms, trust becomes the fundamental currency. Companies that honor customer terms, deliver promised value, and respect customer sovereignty earn ongoing relationships. Those that don’t lose access.

Network Effects from Standardization IEEE 7012 creates the potential for customer privacy terms to become portable across the entire digital economy. Just as Wi-Fi standards enable seamless connectivity across locations, machine-readable privacy terms enable seamless control across services. Your AI agent carries your terms everywhere you go, automatically negotiating appropriate access and permissions.

Innovation Through Customer Intelligence When customers actively participate in expressing needs and providing feedback, they become partners in innovation rather than subjects of analysis. The collective intelligence from millions of customers clearly expressing intentions reveals market opportunities, product gaps, and service improvements that passive behavioral observation could never identify.

The Cambrian Explosion Revisited

This connects back to the earlier Cambrian explosion metaphor. The biological innovation of that period wasn’t about one organism dominating all others—it was about creating vibrant ecosystems where different organisms developed complementary capabilities that generated value for the entire system.

The Intention Economy, enabled by standards like IEEE 7012 and powered by AI agents, creates similar conditions for a commercial Cambrian explosion. When customers can easily express intentions and companies can efficiently respond to those intentions within customer-controlled parameters, we get:

• Specialization: Companies can focus on excellence in specific domains rather than attempting to capture and hoard customer data across all domains

• Interoperability: Customer terms that work across providers enable seamless experiences without vendor lock-in

• Innovation: New business models emerge around serving clearly expressed customer needs rather than extracting value from customer data

• Adaptation: Both customers and companies continuously evolve their capabilities based on genuine feedback rather than guessed intentions

The Path to Implementation

For customer experience leaders, the practical question is how to participate in this transition. The answer involves several concrete steps:

Prepare for Agent-Mediated Relationships Customer AI agents will increasingly mediate your customer relationships. Design systems that can receive machine-readable intentions, respond to customer-proffered terms, and interact effectively with customer agents rather than just human customers.

Implement IEEE 7012 Compatibility Even before IEEE 7012 becomes official, organizations can begin implementing support for machine-readable privacy terms. This creates first-mover advantage by enabling direct, transparent relationships with customers who want genuine control.

Build Intention-Response Capabilities Develop infrastructure that can respond to clearly expressed customer intentions rather than relying solely on behavioral prediction. This might mean creating “request for proposal” systems where customers can express needs and receive competitive responses.

Shift from Extraction to Collaboration Reconceptualize your relationship with customers from subjects to be analyzed into partners to be served. Measure success by customer satisfaction with value delivered rather than volume of data captured.

The Unwinding Becomes Inevitable

The great unwinding of surveillance capitalism is accelerating because the technical, economic, and social infrastructure for customer sovereignty is finally emerging. The Intention Economy provides the conceptual framework, IEEE 7012 provides the technical standard, and agentic AI provides the practical mechanism.

Organizations that recognize this transition and position themselves as partners in the Intention Economy will thrive. Those that cling to surveillance-based approaches will find themselves competing with ever-degrading data against companies that enjoy direct, trust-based relationships with customers who willingly share rich contextual information.

The future isn’t about companies getting smarter about surveilling customers. It’s about customers having the tools and standards to express their intentions clearly, control their terms explicitly, and create value collaboratively. The companies that understand this distinction and act on it will define the next chapter of customer experience.