It held your data, designed the journey, set the price, and waited for you to come to it. Reading through the FCA’s recently published Mills Review and the work I’ve been doing underneath it, what keeps striking me is how completely that is inverting. Increasingly it’s the consumer - or an agent acting for them - who sits at the centre, and the bank becomes one of many interchangeable providers competing to be chosen by an intelligence that has no brand loyalty, infinite patience for comparison, and a complete picture of your financial life.

Sit with what that intelligence is actually for, and the whole story collapses into a single sentence: agentic AI is hostile to margin earned from friction, and loyal to margin earned from genuine value.

That one line does more work than it looks. An enormous amount of what we pay for - in finance and well beyond - isn’t value. It’s friction. The loyalty penalty you pay because switching is a hassle. The renewal you forget to challenge. The better rate you never chased because you were busy, or tired, or simply living a full life. For a century, being “good with money” meant doing that relentless, unglamorous work yourself - and it quietly punished everyone without the time, confidence or attention to keep it up. Which is to say, most people, most of the time.

An agent doesn’t get tired. It does that diligence for everyone, continuously, for almost nothing. For centuries the diligence that builds financial security has always favoured the affluent and the attentive. Hand it to a machine and you don’t just make finance more convenient - you take something rationed to the wealthy and make it universal. For most people, that could be the single biggest improvement in their financial lives in a generation.

But I didn’t come here to write about banking. Because “hostile to friction, loyal to value” isn’t a financial rule. It’s a solvent, and it dissolves the same way in every consumer industry.

Think about hospitality. A great deal of what a hotel earns rests on friction too - the tedium of comparison that keeps you booking the familiar chain, the loyalty scheme built on your inertia. Hand the booking to an agent working genuinely for you and the familiar name stops mattering; what matters is whether the room actually fits the intention you set. Retail: an agent that fills the basket re-intermediates the entire shelf, and brand attachment - the thing marketing spent a century building - loses its grip against an unsentimental machine comparing on suitability and value. And marketing itself, where it gets genuinely dizzying: if the agent does the buying, who is the advertising even for? You’re no longer persuading a human with an emotional appeal. You’re trying to be legible to a machine.

That’s the pattern under all of it. Value stops flowing to whoever owns the shopfront, the brand, or the customer’s inertia - and starts flowing to whoever is genuinely the best, most legible, fairest option the agent can find. That should be good news. A world that pays for value instead of friction is a better world.

Which brings us to the question the whole thing turns on - and for once it’s not a warning, it’s an instruction. If value now flows to whoever the agent judges best for the person, then the winning move is obvious: be that. Serve the person genuinely. The losing move is the tempting one - to build an agent that wears the customer’s colours while quietly working for you. That’s the double agent, and I want to be clear it isn’t just a moral failing. In a market built to expose friction and reward value, it’s a strategic one. An assistant that steers people toward the outcomes that pay its maker is precisely the thing this technology is designed to catch.

And here’s the reframe I think matters most for anyone building, buying or deploying one of these - which, over the next decade, is most of us. I’m not asking anyone to pretend they’re a charity. A business can and should capture value; that was never the sin. The sin is hiding it inside advice that claims to be for the customer. Take your margin in the open, from genuine service, and you have a faithful agent. Bury it in the recommendation, and you have a double one. The difference was never whether the agent has a master. It’s whether it’s honest about having one.

Because in a world loyal to value, that honesty stops being the cost of doing business and becomes the whole advantage. Trust is the moat. The organisation whose agent is genuinely - and provably - on the person’s side is the one that gets chosen, and keeps getting chosen, while the double agents get found out once and never trusted again.

The technology that delivers the good version of this future and the one that delivers the bad version are exactly the same. What separates them is a set of human choices we’re making right now, while the system is still being built. The machine is loyal to value. Our job is to make sure that value belongs to the person it’s meant to serve - and to be honest enough to say where the rest of it goes.