AI and the future of mediation - a Full Moon webinar

We are delighted to announce our next webinar is now scheduled for Monday 9th November. We'll be looking at a subject hiding in plain sight - what effect does AI Agent mediation have on brands and their customers? How abstracted from experience do we really want to be?

We've got two great guests lined up to discuss this with us - Nick Law, Chief Creative Chairperson of Accenture Song and Tara Mullen of OctoNova, part of Octopus Energy.

Nick has a stellar background - at R/GA, Publicis, Apple and now Accenture. He is never short of a pithy opinion, and rich in insight. Tara has a deep background in operations and leadership at Tesla and now Octopus Energy - in our view one of the most interesting brands in the UK of the last decade, with an unwavering focus on the customer.

The webinar is based on our most recent Full Moon essay - Muse, The Sausage Ladder and How Trust Gets Abstracted.

If you've not read it (really, why not?), here are some key points we will be discussing....

AI is adding new and powerful layers of mediation to our lives. Or is it substituting for, maybe even simplifying, other layers of mediation we already long accepted?

This is hugely important for brands, products, services and experiences. Will AI enabled agents make them closer to us or more disconnected? And – a constant theme for Full Moon – what about us humans? A lot rides - commercially - on understanding these new and shifting layers. For brands: how abstracted away from the customer do you want to be? Usually the answer is not very, or not at all. Is that realistic, or will you have to accept it somewhere? These are big, relevant questions for marketers, designers, service providers and brand owners.....

This is not just about mediation, but also abstraction. Agents aren't only a layer between us and the thing; they also abstract it. I want to disentangle the two words.

Mediation is about who or what stands between you and the thing. It's an intermediary: a butcher, a bank teller, an algorithm, an agent. It has a position, often interests of its own and it can be removed or swapped. The question here is who's in the middle, and whose side are they on?

Abstraction is about what level you operate at. You deal with a representation or summary of the thing, not the thing: money for value, a dashboard for an organisation, a prompt for a design, an instruction ("book me a weekend away") for a hundred decisions. The details are hidden. Its question is what can't you see or feel any more?

Why now?

Because Muse, Instinct and other agents are taking off. The debate has been coming for a while. The time to have it is now. Not only is a lot of money at stake, but also deep changes to how we experience our lives.