your next customer might not be a person

a founder who spent a decade inside the payments world, and now sells software to banks, said something in passing that has been rattling around my head all week.

his customers are showing up with agents.

the picture he painted. a corporate treasury team runs a financial close every month. seventy five steps. about fifteen of those involve talking to their bank. and now they arrive and say, i am not doing those fifteen myself any more, my agent is going to do them, how do i plug in.

sit with that for a second.

every interface a bank has built in the last thirty years assumes a tired human on the other end. the portal, the phone tree, the relationship manager who gets back to you tuesday, the form that has to be re keyed by somebody in another department because the two systems do not talk. all of it was designed around a person who will wait, who will call back, who will forgive.

the agent does not wait. it does not accept we will get back to you in three days as an answer. it does not care that your credit team and your onboarding team are on different platforms and have never met. it retries, or it routes around you, or it reports back to its owner that this vendor cannot do the thing.

he built his company on the observation that banks are siloed inside and that going live with one is a fraught process. that was already a business worth building. what is new is that the friction he abstracts away is about to be measured by software, precisely, in a log file, by a customer who can compare you to the alternative in an afternoon.

here is the larger thing i think is happening. for the entire history of commerce, every company has been quietly subsidised by human patience. customers put up with hold music, sixteen field forms and two week waits because there was no alternative and because people tolerate things. that subsidy is running out.

the companies coasting on it are about to discover how much of their moat was really just their customers' low expectations.

and this is where the machine economy actually begins, in the boring way real shifts always begin. not with a robot walking down your street. with a treasury agent that refuses to tolerate your onboarding process.

if a piece of software had to buy from you tomorrow, with no human helping it, how far would it get?