“Where am I getting screwed?” that’s the question entrepreneur Mark Cuban asks his large language model. I heard him say it in conversation with Allie Miller on a webinar this week.
And it’s the question behind one thing that really excites me from a consumer perspective about the potential of agentic AI: as a tool to combat the bureaucracy of every day life.
No more negotiating labyrinth-like complaints processes, no more attempting to cancel Amazon Prime that you never really intended to sign up for, going through 50 screens.
Your AI agent combats the forces of injustice on your behalf.
Are businesses going be ready for this AI apocalypse of complaints of customers raising issues that they’ve always been able to raise but it just wasn’t worth their while?
Do small businesses start taking large businesses to the Small Claims Court for unpaid invoices because all they need to do is set their relentless agent on it?
Is there going to be a modern-day vigilante that goes around reporting potholes to the local council? Snap a photo and the metadata and all the info and geolocation are just routed straight there. It’s not a system that the council has put in place. It’s agentic, it’s citizen-led.
Do applicants start to be able to fight back against the applicant tracking system that auto-rejects their application? Effort used to be a key distinguisher between poor candidates and good candidates but when the bar for quality is raised, do the methods for evaluation need to evolve?
And it’s not just Mark Cuban. Even in areas as sensitive as finance, the FCA’s Mills Review found that 1 in 5 UK adults were “open to AI making decisions for them” and 26% were already trusting the likes of Claude and ChatGPT to give them financial advice.
One of my favourite business books of the last few years has been The Friction Project: How Smart Leaders Make the Right Things Easier and the Wrong Things Harder by Bob Sutton and Huggy Rao. Apparently, the working title of the book was “The Sh*t-fixers.”
So, the question for the week, where do you think AI can be a sh*tfixer for you? I’m going to start with the 99p I’ve been paying Apple for at least 10 years for storage that I don’t even know if I’m using.