The radar · an 18-month horizon, held in public

What hits service next, and where to stand.

Six signals I am tracking from the operating floor, each with the consensus take the industry will comfort itself with, and the position I would actually defend. Held in public so you can mark my homework later.

Last revised June 2026Updated as the picture changes

01T+0 · Already here

Your next user is not a person. It is their agent.

The signal. AI agents are starting to act on the user's behalf, diagnosing, escalating, transacting, resolving. The best support experiences already feel like this: a fault confirmed, a replacement shipped, before the conversation has finished.

The lazy take. "Chatbots, version two. Bolt one onto the portal, count the deflections, report the saving."

The position. Agents are a new class of customer. Your catalogue, your entitlements and your service contracts must become machine-readable and machine-actionable. Experience design now includes users who never see your interface.

02T+12 months

The face becomes the endpoint.

The signal. Meta is selling AI Ray-Bans at consumer prices. Gucci is making smart glasses with Google. A keynote has already been delivered from a pair: no notes, no visible script, five hundred delegates none the wiser.

The lazy take. "Niche gadgetry. We'll revisit wearables when there's enterprise demand."

The position. Within eighteen months a meaningful slice of your workforce wears cameras, microphones and an assistant on their face. Support becomes ambient; the distance between question and answer collapses. How do you write a BYOD policy for someone's face? Slowly, badly, or now.

03T+0 · Already here

The operating model becomes software.

The signal. Provisioning in code, assurance by telemetry, resolution by agents. The routine layer of service is being absorbed into software faster than most organisations can redraw their org charts.

The lazy take. "We're doing AI, we've bought the platform and stood up a centre of excellence."

The position. 64% of UK organisations say they use AI; roughly a quarter are anywhere near mature adoption. The gap is not technology, it is organisational design. AI lands or stalls in the operating model, and most were built for tickets, not flow. Stop buying tools to manage queues. Build services that do not queue.

04T+12–18 months

The smartphone quietly loses the centre.

The signal. Glasses on faces, intelligence in earpieces, watches losing their jobs to ambient assistants. The phone is still in the pocket: it is just no longer where the action is.

The lazy take. "Mobile-first remains the strategy. We've only just finished the app."

The position. The post-smartphone workplace arrives unevenly, but every service designed around "open the app, log the ticket" inherits a dying interaction model. Design for intent expressed anywhere: spoken, glanced, delegated to an agent.

05T+0 · Already here

The workforce tears up the service contract.

The signal. A generation raised on instant, ambient, self-evidently competent service is now your workforce. They will not queue. They will not log a ticket and wait for a callback.

The lazy take. "Satisfaction scores are holding up. The desk is hitting its SLAs."

The position. The risk is not poor satisfaction scores. It is irrelevance, workarounds, shadow tools, a quiet spreadsheet called "things IT can't fix". A 98% SLA next to that spreadsheet is not success; it is a brilliantly organised description of yesterday.

06T+18 months +

Competence becomes a commodity. Judgement becomes the market.

The signal. Every provider, every team, every individual gains the same competent baseline at roughly the same time. The average deliverable is now free.

The lazy take. "Automate the existing model, bank the efficiency, publish the AI strategy."

The position. Most AI strategies are a detailed plan to become average, faster. The floor rises for everyone; the ceiling stays human, judgement, taste, context, the ability to pick the right problem. Spend your best people there, or spend them making yesterday cheaper while the game moves.

Disagree?

Good. Bring it to the room.

Every position on this page is held in public and argued live on stage. If your board is wrestling with any of them, that is a conversation worth having properly.

Book Mark to speak Read the manifesto

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