What’s different this time? All the way back to AllAdvantage in the late 1990s we have been trying to create models that allow users to get paid for their data. Why then are consumers still getting paid cents, not dollars, let alone tens of dollars for their personal information? They do this for one simple reason; the way we’re monetizing data today is the same way we sell raw crude oil; in bulk and unrefined.
We’ve built our data economy the same way we built the oil economy in the wild west era; “take everything you can, by any means necessary and pay as little as possible for it”. Accordingly, regulation has evolved not to streamline access and ensure fair compensation for data, but to ensure “privacy” by reducing data’s utility and progressively stripping it of identifying marks.
The thing is that people don’t want privacy. They want personalization, they want value and ultimately, they want control.
Enter AI Agents.
- 50% of the current crop of Y-Combinator startups are in the AI Agent space.
- PayPal recently announced a revamp of their tech stack to support agentic payments
- Coinbase has gone all in on Agentic based stablecoin payments
The dirty secret though: AI Agents trained solely on massive aggregated and anonymized data sets are….ok? Search engines on steroids with some better connectivity?
However, AI Agents trained on consented, validated, “zero-party” data directly from consumers with proper connectivity to payment rails, credit bureaus and financial services are a complete game changer.
Think about the value proposition of your data when it’s vended into a multi-trillion data point model with no link back to you as an individual. Cents.
Think about the value proposition of your individual data when it’s vended into a hyper specific AI Agent model that finds you completely personalized financial services. Those leads can be worth hundreds of dollars.
The pie to flow value back to consumers just grew exponentially.
Finally Control of Your Data Fire Hose.
This isn’t to say either that personalized AI Agents are firing your highly identifiable personal data all over the internet, far from it. Technology such as Retrieval Augmented Generation, Snowflake’s Data Clean Room and Zero Knowledge Verified Outputs allow this type of comprehensive personalization without sacrificing privacy in the technical sense.
Further, personalized Agents can “show their work” and give a user schematics of what data they are using where for what purpose and even fine tune what data should be ignored from their insights and training. Sure, Google gives you the ability to nuclear bomb all your data from the platform and lose all utility, but AI Agents finally give you real, granular, data control.
When a consumer feels that they are getting truly differentiated utility, real economic value and a sense of control of the data that’s being contributed to their agent, the model completely flips from “I’m going to opt out of all sharing” to “more more more more”.
Finally, a Better Data Model.
People have been clamoring for a better data model, better search and more convenience from our technology for years, but the technology to truly bring this all together didn’t exist even 3 years ago, and the pace of change is immense.
Search is dead, it just doesn’t know it yet.
In the very near-term people will not search or browse to find something, they will ask a personal AI agent, trained on their personal data to find it, pay for it for it, book it, sign it, ship it etc.
Total advertising spend is expected to top $1 trillion for the first time in 2025. With the extreme pace of evolution, it is highly possible that the majority of this spend will be directed at personalized AI Agents.
When an insurance renewal is coming up in 60 days, insurance brands can pay a premium to create fully tailored and bindable insurance offers to you using validated data and presented to you by your AI Agent in full detail. A premium lead like this can go for well over $100.
When a house has just been purchased, local general contractors can create tailored offers specifically for your house based on the inspection report and have your agent answer all the follow up questions and plan out the job. Leads like this routinely go for over $100 as well.
Blockchain Based Data Supply Chains Are the Next Step.
AI Agents are the core, but the suite of tech around this monetization is the next key step
Hyper granular data valuation models, a data supply chain, data royalties, infinitely divisible blockchain based data micropayments, real-time “data staking”.
AI Agents are exploding today; the next step is to tie these machine speed agents into machine speed payment and compensation rails.
As the connectivity of all of this grows, we’re finally about to take the value of personal data from cents to (tens of) dollars.
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