US Consumer Spending Growth Slows While Inflation Remains Soft
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US consumers hit the brakes in April after the strongest month of spending since early 2023 while inflation remained tame, consistent with a slowing economy.
Inflation-adjusted personal spending rose 0.1% after rising 0.7% a month earlier, Bureau of Economic Analysis data showed Friday.
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His vision of a digital assistant that could pan the media to get what you need, to get the 'nuggets' (as he calls them), so that you could avoid polluting your mind and your mood by dipping into the raging torrent to find the valuable piece of information that you wanted. I rather like the metaphor of my agent diligently exploring for gold in a raging river of lies, nonsense, manipulative tripe and propaganda while I get on with other things. Now, as Joe Marhese notes, our entire online economy is built on top of systems trying to capture and optimize our time and attention. Advertising promises to deliver a message in return for this attention. Performance marketing promises outcomes, which has an entirely different meaning when it comes to agents and the models behind them. This makes me reflect further on something that Ken Mandel wrote about how marketing is going to be disrupted because while humans are the target of advertisements, in the near future the kind of agents that Sir Demis is predicting will filter everything including the advertisements. He talks about the emerging 'AdTech' world where brands, agencies and agents will use structured data to communicate and to exchange data about wants, needs, preferences and offers. Or, as he rather neatly puts it, the future of advertising is 'code, not copy'. Bot motivation. This is where financial services are going. When my agent wants to open a savings account, it will negotiate with the agents of financial services providers. But how will it choose which one to select? Assuming that it is going choose on something more than price, that is. Service providers may need to start thinking about reshaping some surfaces towards agent preferences, which might differ from human preferences. I can imagine that agents might prioritise factors like the speed of response, uptime, data accuracy and so on. Optimising for these non-human factors could provide banks a competitive edge, so they should probably begin to assess their strategies for the medium term. (But I can also imagine asking my agent about some softer factors. That is, agents might be programmed to optimise for value, not just cost. They might weigh a variety of other factors such as long-term reliability, risk-adjusted returns, compliance and alignment with ethical frameworks. For example, an agent might recommend a slightly more expensive investment product if it offers superior risk management or aligns better with a user's ethical preferencesI might choose a Gretabot that prioritises 'green' investments or I might choose an Elonbot that invests in space or a Dimonbot or whatever else. That is, different people will be panning for different nuggets in the same stream.) When it comes to choosing between two similarly-ranked choices though, I rather suspect that Ken is right to point to what he calls 'trust signals" as the key because agents will prioritise trusted brands not based on our human and emotional version of trust but on a more measured version based on reputation, verified reviews and sustainability metrics instead of traditional advertising. This reinforces my view about the priority of establishing standard ways for extend identification, authentication and authorisation services to agents. I actually see this within Sir Demis' cautiously optimistic context, because I think that it will be much harder to 'game' trust in an AI world. Imagine, for example, that when your AI pays the bill at a restaurant, the restaurant bot gives your bot a cryptographic token, some form of zero-knowledge or blinded proof that you ate at the restaurant. Then in order to submit a review of the restaurant on some online service your agent would have to provide that proof. The restaurant would not know who you are, but it would know for sure that you had dined there. As it happens, I am organising a trip to Boston in a few weeks time. For such a trip, I don't want to presented with 30 different hotel options: even the most rudimentary agents ought to be able to narrow that down to three to show. I do not have time to search restaurant reviews or go back through my calendar to see where I invited guests last time, my agent can do that and show me three it chooses for me. I don't know whether to book a midweek supersaver fare or a roundtrip Wednesdays only carry on bag fare, I'll the agent choose - it already knows I prioritise punctuality over online meal choices. It was impossible to escape AI at Davos this year, since every conversation touched on the shift toward agentic AI. To be honest, I'm looking forward to this new life. While the agents work tirelessly to protest my attention from data assault and battery—ranging from impossible to assess offers to sell me hotel points to endless solicitation for new credit cards—I can get on and carry out more useful (and certainly more creative) activities.
