Attention to Intention: Building Customer Agency with NeoMails and BrandTwins

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A Better Way

Sir Tim Berners-Lee, the father of the World Wide Web, believes the internet has lost its soul—what began as an open, creative, collaborative network has devolved into a maze of walled gardens and surveillance engines fighting for our attention. The web’s original promise of generating a creative, collaborative and universal community of users has been despoiled by exclusionary walled gardens of content, the spread of disinformation and the rise of addictive, often toxic social media.

His remedy is profound: shift from the attention economy—where tech giants monetise distraction—to the intention economy—where digital systems serve individuals, respect privacy, and act in their interests. The challenge is to turn our online attention economy, in which giant corporations battle to capture and monetise our time, into an intention economy that serves the individual’s needs and preserves their privacy. It is a vision of a new web powered by personal AI agents and open protocols, restoring agency to people rather than platforms. Berners-Lee envisages Charlie, a safe, secure and personalised AI agent that will work solely in the user’s interests, helping manage the small complexities of daily life whilst knowing fitness goals, family dietary needs and personal schedules.

Yet even as Berners-Lee champions this empowering vision, a darker interpretation has emerged. Researchers warn of a lucrative yet troubling new marketplace for digital signals of intent, where AI assistants forecast and influence decision-making at early stages, selling these developing intentions in real time to companies before consumers have made up their minds. In this dystopian version, companies bid not for keywords already searched but for the right to shape curiosity itself.

Two visions of the intention economy. Same name. Radically different futures.

This is not merely an academic debate—it represents the defining strategic choice brands face in the next decade. And it matters urgently because the current model is collapsing under its own weight.

The $500 Billion AdWaste Crisis

For decades, brands have been trapped in the attention economy’s mirror image: the acquisition economy. They spend billions reacquiring customers they once owned, paying 20–30 per cent “revenue taxes” to ad platforms in the form of commissions, marketplace fees, retargeting costs, and discounts to “one and done” customers. Martech—originally designed to manage relationships—became a profit-bleeding machine, optimising campaigns instead of conversations, measuring impressions rather than intention, and treating customers as targets rather than individuals.

The result is the $500 billion global AdWaste crisis.

The fundamental problem is this: brands cannot derive genuine intention from their own channels. They have ceded customer understanding to intermediaries—Google, Meta, Amazon—paying exorbitant platform taxes to reach people they already know. Traditional marketing depends on one-way broadcast: weekly promotional emails, campaign-driven messaging, transaction-focused touchpoints. This model assumes attention can be rented when needed and ignored when not.

But when AI assistants maintain persistent memory across conversations, learning not just what we ask and our preferences but the trajectory of our curiosity over time, the rules have fundamentally changed. In the past, the search bar was marketing’s purest signal of intention. Now, as conversations with ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Google’s AI Mode replace typed queries, that window of insight has closed. Consumers increasingly express intent through natural language conversations that happen entirely outside brand channels—interactions that brands do not control and cannot access.

This creates an untenable dependency. Brands spend heavily to capture attention through paid platforms, only to lose customers to 80 per cent attention churn rates when engagement inevitably decays. They then spend even more to reacquire the same customers through retargeting, creating a hamster wheel of acquisition-churn-reacquisition that bleeds profitability. Meanwhile, the genuine intention signals—what customers actually want, when they want it, and why—remain invisible or monetised by platform intermediaries.

The current trajectory leads to a future where curiosity becomes the final scarcity, and the systems being built today will determine whether that curiosity expands or contracts, whether we ask better questions or stop questioning altogether. In this world, brands become supplicants—paying ever-higher fees for the privilege of guessing at customer intent through probabilistic targeting and behavioural inference.

There must be a better way—and there is.

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The Alternative

NeoMarketing offers precisely that alternative—the brand-side infrastructure for the good intention economy, the empowering version championed by Tim Berners-Lee and Doc Searls, not the dystopian surveillance version warned of by Cambridge researchers.

NeoMarketing re-engineers marketing around ownership, agency, and individual value creation. Its mantra—Never lose customers. Never pay twice.—transforms marketing from a cost centre into a profit engine. The progression is elegant: Attention → Intention → Transaction. First, win back daily attention through genuine utility. Second, understand evolving intentions through two-way dialogue. Third, enable frictionless transactions when intention becomes action.

This is not manipulation—it is response. Not manufacturing desire—but recognising and serving it. Not extracting value—but exchanging it transparently.

And at its heart lies NeoMails, the daily medium through which the intention economy comes alive.

NeoMails: The Inbox as Attention-and-Intention Operating System

NeoMails represent something quietly revolutionary: the transformation of the inbox from promotional dumping ground into the world’s first attention-and-intention operating system. They turn email into the most powerful owned channel in the digital world—a living feed of interactive, personalised, rewarding experiences delivered in sixty seconds or less.

Each NeoMail blends three elements:

• SmartBlocks deliver utility and entertainment—games, polls, quizzes, tips, news, and predictions. These create the habit loop: customers return not because they’re obligated but because there’s genuine value waiting. A coffee brand sends brewing tips and origin stories. A fashion retailer delivers styling challenges. A financial services company provides market insights. Daily. Consistently. Rewardingly.
• BrandBlocks enable contextual discovery and personalised recommendations. These aren’t generic product pushes but intelligent suggestions based on accumulated understanding. As preferences emerge through daily interactions, recommendations become increasingly relevant—not through surveillance but through voluntary data sharing.
• ActionAds provide frictionless, in-place commerce. Customers can complete transactions directly within the email, eliminating the 80–90 per cent drop-off that occurs when users must click through to websites. This transforms the inbox from a waystation to a destination—where discovery, decision, and transaction happen seamlessly.

Every interaction earns Mu, the atomic rewards currency that pays customers for their attention and builds enduring habits. This creates transparent value exchange—brands fund attention with rewards customers actually want, making every action a fair trade rather than an imposition. Mu in subject lines signals immediate value: “µ.491 | Your Daily Digest.” Customers know exactly what’s at stake before opening.

This fusion of interactivity, incentive, and individualisation transforms email from a broadcast relic into an agentic medium—where AI, data, and value exchange converge to align brand and customer intentions.

BrandTwin: Charlie’s Commercial Counterpart

In Berners-Lee’s vision, the future of the intention economy requires truly personal AI agents aligned with individual interests, working for the user rather than large corporations. He calls his personal agent Charlie.

NeoMarketing provides Charlie’s brand-side counterpart: the BrandTwin.

Each customer’s BrandTwin operates as their AI representative within the brand ecosystem—knowing preferences, learning from interactions, predicting needs, and optimising experiences for mutual value. It’s not a surveillance tool but a translator, converting behaviour into understanding and understanding into better service.

From the customer’s perspective, BrandTwin acts as their advocate—filtering noise, ensuring relevance, and guaranteeing every interaction adds value. It remembers that they prefer Ethiopian coffee over Colombian, that they engage most at 8:47am, that they love trivia but skip polls, that sustainability stories matter more than brewing tips.

From the brand’s perspective, BrandTwin enables true N=1 personalisation at scale—moving from crude segments of thousands to genuinely individual experiences. Every NeoMail becomes unique, assembled specifically for that customer based on accumulated intelligence.

Crucially, this intelligence comes from zero-party data—information customers voluntarily share through daily interactions. Poll responses. Quiz answers. Preference selections. Explicit feedback. This data is consent-based, durable (surviving cookie deprecation), accurate (self-reported truth versus inferred behaviour), and defensible (creating switching costs through accumulated understanding).

What Berners-Lee calls Solid pods for personal data control, NeoMarketing realises as profit pods—living relationships that grow more valuable with every interaction. The BrandTwin becomes a Live Ledger, tracking real-time P&L at the individual level—every dollar of revenue generated, every cent invested, ensuring marketing actions enhance profitability for specific customers.

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Just as India created the India Stack—providing public digital rails for payments and identity on which private ingenuity could flourish—NeoMails create the attention rails for the new marketing economy. They let brands own their customer relationships again, free from algorithmic toll collectors. Each day’s NeoMail compounds attention into intention, intention into habit, and habit into profitability. Frequency creates familiarity. Familiarity creates trust. Trust creates permission to understand intention authentically.

This is not advertising reinvented—it is marketing reborn as mutual service.

The infrastructure being built right now will determine the future. The question is no longer who controls what we read, but who controls what we think to ask. Will it be platforms manipulating curiosity for profit? Or will it be brands and customers collaborating in voluntary relationships where intention is expressed, understood, and served?

From Attention to Intention

The age of agentic AI demands infrastructure that respects individuals and rewards value creation. Berners-Lee’s vision gives us the philosophy; NeoMails and BrandTwins provide the implementation.

Together they mark the shift from attention to intention, from data extraction to data empowerment, from platform dependence to relationship ownership, and from AdWaste to profit recovery.

Every great transformation begins with a small behavioural shift. In marketing’s case, it’s the rediscovery of the daily conversation between brand and customer.

The web began with a promise: this is for everyone. NeoMails and BrandTwins fulfil that promise in the inbox—transforming daily attention into enduring intention, casual engagement into committed relationships, and marketing into a movement for profitable, human-centred growth.

The intention economy is coming. The only question is which version we build. NeoMarketing chooses empowerment over exploitation, dialogue over broadcast, and mutual value over extractive rent-seeking.

This is the future Berners-Lee envisioned. This is the future marketing needs. And it begins with a simple but revolutionary act: sending something worth opening, every single day.

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Doc Searls – 1

Doc Searls coined the phrase “The Intention Economy” in 2006. He wrote a book on it with the subtitle “When Customers Take Charge” in 2012. Here is an excerpt from the first chapter:

This book stands with the customer. This is out of necessity, not sympathy. Over the coming years customers will be emancipated from systems built to control them. They will become free and independent actors in the marketplace, equipped to tell vendors what they want, how they want it, where and when—even how much they’d like to pay—outside of any vendor’s system of customer control…

Demand will no longer be expressed only in the forms of cash, collective appetites, or the inferences of crunched data over which the individual has little or no control. Demand will be personal. This means customers will be in charge of personal information they share with all parties, including vendors.

Customers will have their own means for storing and sharing their own data, and their own tools for engaging with vendors and other parties…

Thus relationship management will go both ways. Just as vendors today are able to manage relationships with customers and third parties, customers tomorrow will be able to manage relationships with vendors and fourth parties, which are companies that serve as agents of customer demand, from the customer’s side of the marketplace.

Relationships between customers and vendors will be voluntary and genuine, with loyalty anchored in mutual respect and concern, rather than coercion…

Likewise, rather than guessing what might get the attention of consumers—or what might “drive” them like cattle—vendors will respond to actual intentions of customers. Once customers’ expressions of intent become abundant and clear, the range of economic interplay between supply and demand will widen, and its sum will increase. The result we will call the Intention Economy.

Doc Searls wrote in October 2024: “Agentic AI can also make customers better for companies by making them more self-informed about their actual needs, and what goods and services they actually have. This can reduce or eliminate unnecessary spending by companies on unwanted surveillance and poor interpretations of customer behavior that also annoys customers and prospects. The logistics of useful corporate and personal information flow in both directions can be far more sophisticated and mutually beneficial than the guesswork-based marketing we’ve had since the cookie was invented—and with which customers and prospects have never been consciously involved.”

Here is more on the work being done by Doc Searls from a July 2025 interview by Nico Fara:

The core of the conversation revisited the foundational idea of The Intention Economy: shifting the balance of power from corporations to customers. For decades, the prevailing business model has operated on the assumption that a captive customer—one locked into an ecosystem—is the most valuable. Searls dismantles this notion, arguing that true value lies in freedom and agency. In the physical world, like at a farmer’s market, you are a free agent, and your value comes from your choice to engage. The digital world, however, has been built on a language of “targets to be acquired, managed, and controlled,” which Searls equates to the language of animal husbandry and slavery.

The Intention Economy proposes a world where customers can signal their needs and intentions to the market on their own terms, creating a more dynamic and respectful relationship. This isn’t just about better feedback mechanisms; it’s about fundamentally re-architecting the marketplace to be a conversation among peers, not a system of surveillance and capture. The goal is to move from being “fish in a barrel” shot with marketing messages to becoming empowered “dancers in the marketplace.”

… We are currently stuck in the “mainframe era” of artificial intelligence, where massive, centralized AIs are controlled by a handful of corporations. These AIs are not designed to serve you; they are designed to serve their creators by better predicting and influencing your behavior. Searls makes a compelling case that the next logical step in our technological evolution—the completion of the PC revolution—is the Personal AI.

This isn’t just a “personalized” interface on a corporate platform. It’s an AI that is truly yours, operating on your behalf from a device you control. Imagine an AI that consolidates your contacts, calendar, travel history, and subscription data, not for a corporation’s benefit, but for yours alone. It could manage the overwhelming influx of data in our lives and give us back control. This personal AI would be the guardian of your data, helping you pull it from the silos of Google, Apple, and others, so you can finally own and use your own life’s information.

Also see this by Doc Searls from December 2024.

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Doc Searls – 2

I asked Claude and ChatGPT to write about the original thinking on the Intention Economy by Doc Searls and then provide an update on his latest work at Kwaai.ai.

Doc Searls coined the term “intention economy” in a March 2006 Linux Journal article, writing that the intention economy grows around buyers, not sellers, leveraging the simple fact that buyers are the first source of money and that they come ready-made—you don’t need advertising to make them. His vision was radical: invert the power dynamics of commerce so customers, not vendors, controlled relationships.

Searls saw a fundamental problem with how markets operated. Customers would be emancipated from systems built to control them, becoming free and independent actors in the marketplace, equipped to tell vendors what they want, how they want it, where and when—even how much they’d like to pay—outside of any vendor’s system of customer control. Rather than vendors capturing and locking customers inside what he called “silos” and “walled gardens,” customers would form and break relationships on their own terms.

The economic theory was straightforward but profound: free customers are more valuable than captive ones—to themselves, to the companies they deal with, and to the marketplace. If this proved true, it would fundamentally reshape commerce.

From Vision to Action: ProjectVRM

To make this vision real, Searls launched ProjectVRM in 2006 at Harvard’s Berkman Klein Center for Internet and Society, with VRM standing for Vendor Relationship Management—the customer-side counterpart of Customer Relationship Management. The project had two purposes: encouraging development of tools by which individuals could take control of their relationships with organisations, and conducting research on VRM-related theories and usage.

The core principles were uncompromising. Customers must enter relationships as independent actors, be the points of integration for their own data, have control of data they generate and gather with the ability to share it selectively and voluntarily, be able to assert their own terms of engagement, and be free to express their demands and intentions outside of any one company’s control.

These weren’t merely aspirational statements. They represented practical requirements for customer freedom. Searls envisioned customers equipped with their own tools—what he later called “first person technologies”—to manage vendor relationships. Soon consumers would be able to control the flow and use of personal data, build their own loyalty programmes, dictate their own terms of service, and tell whole markets what they want, how they want it, where and when they should be able to get it, and how much it should cost—all outside of any one vendor’s silo.

Demand Drives Supply

Searls’s intention economy represented a fundamental correction to how markets function. Demand would no longer be expressed only in the forms of cash, collective appetites, or the inferences of crunched data over which individuals have little control—demand would be personal, with customers having their own means for storing and sharing their own data and their own tools for engaging with vendors.

Rather than vendors guessing what might capture consumer attention or what might “drive” them like cattle, vendors would respond to actual intentions of customers, and once customers’ expressions of intent became abundant and clear, the range of economic interplay between supply and demand would widen, and its sum would increase.

This wasn’t about eliminating vendors or destroying markets. It was about creating genuine relationships anchored in mutual respect rather than coercion. The volume, variety and relevance of information coming from customers in the intention economy would strip the gears of systems built for controlling customer behaviour or limiting customer input, whilst the quality of that information would obsolete or repurpose the guesswork mills of marketing fed by crumb-trails of data shed by customers’ mobile gear and web browsers.

The distinction Searls drew was crucial: the intention economy would prioritise “small data”—the individual’s own data about themselves—over the “big data” that brands harvest without permission. By giving customers control of their own data and the ability to share it selectively, the intention economy would foster transparency, trust, and better outcomes for both sides. This wasn’t just a change in marketing tactics but a shift in infrastructure: open protocols, individual agency, interoperability, and tools that let customers act in the marketplace rather than just be targeted by it.

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Doc Searls – 3

Nearly two decades after coining the term “intention economy,” Searls now believes the missing piece has finally arrived: personal AI. Searls serves as Chief Intention Officer at Kwaai.ai, a nonprofit developing an open-source personal AI operating system, recruited because founder Reza Rassool believes personal AI is required to make the intention economy finally happen.

The distinction is critical. Searls distinguishes sharply between “personal AI” and “personalised AI.” Personalised AI—what tech giants offer today—serves corporate interests whilst appearing to serve users. It analyses your behaviour, predicts your preferences, and nudges you toward outcomes that benefit the platform. Personal AI, by contrast, works exclusively for the individual, operating on open-source infrastructure that users control completely.

Kwaai has developed pAI-OS (pronounced “pie oh ess”), a Personal AI Operating System capable of supporting many AI use cases, with applications running on it called “abilities”. This architecture parallels how traditional operating systems provide platforms for applications, but specifically oriented around AI capabilities that serve individual users rather than corporate agendas. Users own the system, control the data, and determine how their AI agents behave.

Why Personal AI Changes Everything

The vision is transformative. The Kwaai approach aims to create a system where agentic AI on the customer side can give corporate agents a hand to shake, allowing both personal and corporate agents to work to common benefit. This represents the evolution of VRM—where customers don’t just manage relationships manually but deploy AI agents that negotiate, express preferences, and make decisions on their behalf.

As Searls explains, personal AI will be as revolutionary in the coming years as the personal computer was in the 1980s, the Internet in the 1990s, and the mobile phone in the 2010s—and in all those earlier cases, it wasn’t companies that led revolutions in productivity, but people working for those companies using their own devices and networks. The same pattern will repeat: once individuals have AI agents operating on their behalf, the entire structure of digital commerce will reshape around that reality.

Personal AI agents will gather, manage, and deploy the individual’s data from various silos—subscriptions, calendars, travel history, preferences, purchases—all under the individual’s control. They will express intentions on behalf of users, negotiate with vendor systems, manage privacy preferences, and enforce terms of service that protect individual interests. This is VRM made operational through AI.

The Bilateral Future

The intention economy inspired Tim Berners-Lee’s Solid Project, Consumer Reports’ Permission Slip, and work on personal AI at Kwaai.ai—demonstrating how Searls’s 2006 vision continues to shape efforts to build customer-centric infrastructure. But the ecosystem isn’t complete with customer-side tools alone. Markets require two sides: buyers and sellers, customers and vendors, intentions and responses.

This is where NeoMarketing enters the picture.

Connecting Searls’s Vision to NeoMarketing

Searls builds the customer-side infrastructure—personal AI agents that express intentions, control data, and negotiate terms. NeoMarketing builds the brand-side counterpart—the commercial infrastructure that recognises, understands, and responds to those intentions authentically.

Where Searls envisions personal AI agents (like Berners-Lee’s “Charlie”) working solely for individual users, NeoMarketing provides BrandTwins—AI representatives that work for customers within the brand ecosystem, translating behaviour into understanding and understanding into better service. Where Searls advocates for customers controlling their own data through personal pods, NeoMarketing implements zero-party data collection through NeoMails—voluntary, consent-based information sharing that builds mutual value.

The architecture is bilateral: customers with personal AI agents expressing intentions meet brands with BrandTwins understanding and responding to those intentions. NeoMails create the daily touchpoints where this dialogue happens—not through extraction but through transparent value exchange. The Live Ledger tracks the economics at the individual level, ensuring every interaction enhances profitability for both sides.

This is the future Searls envisioned made operational: markets where demand drives supply directly, where customers and vendors meet as equals with AI agents representing both sides, where relationships form voluntarily based on mutual benefit rather than coercion. The intention economy isn’t just a customer-side revolution—it requires brands willing to build the infrastructure that makes genuine bilateral agency possible.

NeoMarketing represents the brand-side answer to Searls’s customer-side vision. Together, they create the complete architecture for the good intention economy: customers empowered with personal AI to express intentions, brands equipped with BrandTwins to understand and serve those intentions, and both parties meeting in a marketplace built on agency, transparency, and mutual value rather than manipulation, surveillance, and extraction.

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Tim Berners-Lee – 1

Financial Times wrote in October 2025:

The challenge is to turn our online attention economy, in which giant corporations battle to capture and monetise our time, into an intention economy that serves the individual’s needs and preserves their privacy. “Fortunately — and I’m very optimistic about this — the paradigm shift of AI offers us a unique opportunity to hit the reset button,” he writes.

Yet if the intention economy is to thrive it must enable individuals to control their own data. [Tim] Berners-Lee favours the Fediverse, a nascent network of interconnected digital services and social media, including Bluesky, Mastodon and Matrix, that relies on open protocols. One such protocol is Solid, being commercialised by Berners-Lee’s company Inrupt, which enables users to control their own agentic data pods, or wallets, and grant access to trusted services.

… Berners-Lee envisages the creation of a safe, secure and personalised AI agent that will work solely in the user’s interests. Inrupt is in the process of developing Charlie, as he calls it.

The article by Joh Thornhill adds: “Project Liberty [is] a $500mn initiative backed by the American businessman Frank McCourt. This has helped develop the interoperable decentralised social networking protocol (DSNP) that enables users to delegate and revoke access to their data for every application. Project Liberty is now working with more than 170 partner organisations, with the protocol being used by about 14mn people, according to McCourt. “Agency should be returned to individuals,” he tells me…McCourt is convinced that fixing underlying infrastructure is often the most effective means of tackling surface problems. The best way to solve lead poisoning in water, for example, is by replacing dangerous pipes, not the sink and tap. Systemic change happens from the bottom up, rather than the top down. As he sees it, the technology is evolving from an app-centric web to an AI-enabled agentic web and that creates white space for change. While it is hard to disrupt 30 years of entrenched technology, it is easier to design new plumbing from scratch.”

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Here is an excerpt from Tim Berners-Lee book, “This Is for Everyone”:

Imagine a world where the computer, instead of trying to distract you, actually does what you ask it to do. This would be the intention economy, of course.

Consider going on holiday. In the past you would visit a travel agent (in person) and share all your dreams for a perfect holiday. They would curate an itinerary for you and off you would go. Booking a trip online now is very different. You can find a lot of useful information regarding anywhere in the world, and the ease with which you can compare prices no doubt permits better deals. And yet there’s also a cost. You might start looking for a holiday in Portugal and you will be served more and more possible holidays in that country. But all of the information you used to share with a travel agent – your food preferences, what types of activities you like, where you have gone before – is not taken into account. A human travel agent may consider your preferences and suggest that a holiday in France might be better suited for you instead. But with personalized advertising you may not even consider that option because you have mainly been shown options for Portugal.

The attention economy is largely responsible for this deficiency. In fact, a great deal of relevant personal information that would enable richer choices is already online; it’s just that the current mechanism based on attention doesn’t account for all of those different data points. The paper trail of a vacation – its digital footprint – is quite significant. What does your phone know about your family holiday? The boarding passes, yes, but also the Instagram photos, the reactions to the Instagram photos, the photos that weren’t posted to Instagram, the calendars, the star ratings of the meals, the activities, the satnav data, the exercise tracks recording your hiking, walking, running, biking and everything else. A human detective, given access to all that data, could create a pretty good picture of how satisfying the trip was, which bits worked, and which bits didn’t. And an AI could do it too, but quickly.

So, say there’s a new kind of travel agent. You want your next family holiday to be unforgettable, and, for the limited purpose of finding an incredible trip, you are prepared to share all that personal data from your family, just for a moment, and exclusively for the purpose of finding the best getaway, before deleting it. The goal is to obtain streamlined travel planning with personalized recommendations based on those data points. The planning could also be integrated with your digital identity for faster check-ins and security screenings. Under ultra-strict privacy controls, we can build the next amazing itinerary. This is the intention economy at work.

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Tim Berners-Lee – 2

I asked Claude and ChatGPT to summarise Tim Berners-Lee’s thinking and work on the intention economy.

Tim Berners-Lee invented the World Wide Web in 1989 with a vision: an open, creative, collaborative network that would empower humanity. But as Berners-Lee himself argues, the web’s promise of openness, universality and collaboration has been derailed by the attention economy, with large platforms capturing user time and data, monetising distraction rather than enabling agency. Three decades later, Berners-Lee hasn’t given up—he’s building the infrastructure to reclaim that promise.

His remedy is radical: shift from the attention economy to an intention economy, in which digital systems serve individuals’ needs, preserve privacy and restore agency to users rather than platforms. The challenge is to turn our online attention economy, in which giant corporations battle to capture and monetise our time, into an intention economy that serves the individual’s needs and preserves their privacy. But unlike Doc Searls, who focused on customer-side tools and vendor relationship management, Berners-Lee is rebuilding the web’s fundamental architecture itself.

As he puts it: the web is being hijacked from an intention economy to an attention economy, where the user has been reduced to a consumable product for the advertiser. He emphasises that this requires infrastructure changes—protocols, data ownership, open standards—rather than just incremental app-layer fixes.

Solid: Data Sovereignty as Infrastructure

Solid (Social Linked Data) is a web decentralisation project led by Berners-Lee that aims to radically change the way web applications work today, resulting in true data ownership as well as improved privacy by developing a platform for linked-data applications that are completely decentralised and fully under users’ control rather than controlled by other entities.

The concept is elegant: instead of your data living in Facebook’s servers, Google’s databases, and Amazon’s warehouses, it lives in your own personal online data store—what Solid calls a “Pod” (Personal Online Data Store). User data is stored in independently managed online repositories called Pods, with access protected by multi-factor authentication, ensuring that users—not corporations—decide who can view or use their personal information and for what purpose.

With Solid, data is decoupled from applications: users decide where their data resides and which app accesses it. The model enables portability, interoperability and user control, supporting a transition from “apps owning your data” to “you owning your data.” It supports the intention economy by putting intent—what users want and share—at the centre, rather than extracting attention and behaviour.

This isn’t just theoretical architecture. Solid is modular and extensible and relies as much as possible on existing W3C standards and protocols, giving users the freedom to choose where their data resides and who is allowed to access it, and by decoupling content from the application itself, users can avoid vendor lock-in, seamlessly switching between apps and personal data storage servers without losing any data or social connections.

Inrupt: Commercialising the Vision

To make Solid real beyond academic research, Berners-Lee co-founded Inrupt in 2017 with tech entrepreneur John Bruce to help build a commercial ecosystem to fuel Solid. Bruce brought experience scaling security software; Berners-Lee brought the vision of data sovereignty. Together, they’re building what Berners-Lee calls “the third layer of the web”—following static pages in the 1990s and interactive applications in the 2000s.

Inrupt launched its Data Wallet in 2024, a digital tool built on the company’s Enterprise Solid Server that allows users to store, manage, and control their personal data, creating interoperable wallets that accept a wide variety of data and make it easy for individuals to consent to access to their data. This shifts the web towards a user-centric approach to how personal data is managed, shared, and used.

The timing is fortuitous. Over 60 per cent of the world’s population is expected to use digital wallets regularly by 2026, and global initiatives like the EU’s Digital Identity Wallet are already showing organisations the benefits of standardisation and interoperability. Berners-Lee isn’t fighting the future—he’s shaping it.

Charlie: The Agent that Works for You

But Solid alone isn’t enough. Data sovereignty provides the foundation; personal AI provides the execution layer. For years, Berners-Lee has imagined an AI called Charlie who works not for a large corporation, but for him, helping manage the small complexities of his day whilst knowing his fitness goals, family dietary needs, and personal schedule—this is the future of the intention economy, where technology helps us achieve what we set out to do rather than distracting us in an attention economy designed to capture our eyeballs for advertisers.

In 2017, Berners-Lee wrote a design note describing Charlie. In late 2024, engineers at Inrupt actually built it. Using a simulated dataset for a fictional user Bob, the team integrated an advanced large language model with Bob’s personal data stored in a Solid Pod to demonstrate the transformative potential of combining AI and Solid Pods, and by accessing rich, structured, and personalised data, Charlie provided responses far superior to generic AI systems.

The difference is dramatic. When asked about buying running shoes without access to personal data, Charlie gives generic advice. With access to Bob’s Solid Pod containing fitness data from Strava, purchase history, nutrition information, and preferences, Charlie bases recommendations on knowledge of Bob’s running from his fitness data but also other buying preferences evident from financial data, making the response devastatingly much more useful.

Unlike other virtual assistants like Amazon’s Alexa and Apple’s Siri, Charlie wouldn’t be linked to Big Tech—it would legally work for its user, just like an agent or a lawyer, and because Charlie really works for the individual, users will trust it with all their data and expect it to be much more insightful.

Charlie acts as a gatekeeper between large-scale AI services and the user’s data, enabling trust, consent and agency. It is envisaged as part of the intention economy: instead of brands or platforms auctioning attention, the user’s agent expresses the user’s intention, engages services on behalf of the user, and preserves value for the individual.

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Tim Berners-Lee – 3

Tim Berners-Lee’s vision creates both challenge and opportunity for brands. The challenge: you can no longer capture and control customer data inside proprietary silos. The opportunity: you can finally build genuine relationships with customers who arrive with rich, authenticated, voluntarily shared data through their personal AI agents.

This is where NeoMarketing enters the conversation.

Connecting Berners-Lee’s Vision to NeoMarketing

Berners-Lee builds the customer-side infrastructure—Solid Pods for data sovereignty and Charlie for personal AI agency. But markets require bilateral architecture: customers with tools to express intentions, and brands with tools to understand and respond to those intentions authentically.

NeoMarketing provides the brand-side counterpart, creating direct parallels:

• Data Sovereignty & Pods → Profit Pods & Live Ledgers Just as Solid Pods give individuals control of their data, NeoMarketing gives each customer a “profit pod”—their relationship ledger tracked through the Live Ledger system—that the brand doesn’t rent but co-owns. Where Berners-Lee ensures users control what data they share, NeoMarketing ensures brands track what value each interaction creates.
• Intention Over Attention → NeoMails as Daily Value Berners-Lee’s intention economy paradigm becomes NeoMarketing’s core mantra: instead of renting attention via ads (AdWaste), brands build owned intent through daily NeoMails interactions. Each NeoMail delivers genuine utility—SmartBlocks for entertainment, BrandBlocks for discovery, ActionAds for frictionless commerce—earning permission to understand intentions rather than extracting attention through interruption.
• Personal Agent (Charlie) → BrandTwin as Brand-Side Counterpart The BrandTwin acts as the brand-side twin of the personal agent. While Charlie is the user’s AI working solely for them, the BrandTwin is the brand’s AI that cooperates with the user’s intent, enabling frictionless two-way value exchange. When Charlie says “my user wants X under these conditions,” BrandTwin responds “here’s how we can serve that intention whilst respecting those terms.”
• Infrastructure Shift → Attention Rails for Marketing Just as Inrupt and Solid provide the plumbing for the new web, NeoMails provide the “attention rails” and the inbox operating system for a marketing infrastructure that respects agency, builds retention and avoids platform tolls. Both are infrastructure plays, not app-layer features.
• Mutual Value Exchange → Transparent Trade In Berners-Lee’s world, when the user controls their data and intention, the service provides value rather than extracts it. In NeoMarketing, each NeoMail interaction delivers value and earns Mu (atomic rewards), creating a fair trade of attention and intention. Zero-party data flows voluntarily because customers receive immediate benefit.

The Bilateral Architecture

The architecture is complementary and creates the complete intention economy:

• Customer side (Berners-Lee): Solid Pods store data → Charlie accesses data with permission → Charlie expresses intentions on user’s behalf
• Brand side (NeoMarketing): NeoMails deliver daily value → BrandTwins learn preferences through voluntary sharing → BrandTwins respond to expressed intentions authentically

This creates the bilateral marketplace both visionaries have always advocated. Customers arrive with personal AI agents that say “I want X under these conditions.” Brands respond with AI systems that say “Here’s how we can serve that intention whilst respecting your terms.” The transaction happens through transparent value exchange rather than manipulation or surveillance.

The web began with the promise “This is for everyone.” NeoMarketing fulfils that promise in commerce: Berners-Lee provides the philosophy and platform for the intention economy; NeoMarketing provides the business implementation of that philosophy in the marketing domain. Together, they create markets where free customers are more valuable than captive ones, where relationships form voluntarily based on mutual benefit, and where technology serves human flourishing rather than corporate extraction.

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Curiosity Graph

Shorestein Center published a fascinating article, “From Attention Merchants to Intention Architects: The invisible infrastructure reshaping human curiosity”. Here are a few excerpts:

The attention merchants have ruled for more than a century, from yellow journalism to clickbait, shock radio to social media. But that empire is crumbling. Major publishers lost 50% of traffic when Google shifted to AI overviews. The $685 billion digital advertising industry faces an existential crisis as AI assistants stop clicking on ads. SEO, the dark art that shaped two decades of web content, started to crack the moment search engines stopped sending people to websites.

Three new signals point to what’s likely to replace this dissolving order. First, AI assistants now maintain persistent memory across our conversations, learning not just what we ask and our preferences, but the trajectory of our curiosity over time. Second, prediction markets have surged past $2 billion in weekly volume, outsourcing the pursuit of answers to market mechanisms that synthesize collective intelligence, transforming uncertainty from a news cycle into a market cycle. Third, a pattern I suspect is more universal, based on the finding that AI conversations typically span multiple questions per user, but can only verify in myself: I use AI not to get answers but to figure out what I’m actually asking. My AI chat histories are littered with iterative conversations that start with one question and end somewhere entirely different, each interaction refining not just the answer but the question itself.

What might be emerging is what I call a “curiosity graph”; not tracking what captures your attention like social media’s interest graph, but mapping the evolution of your questions over time. Each interaction deepens the AI’s understanding not just of what you know, but of what you don’t yet know to ask. In the near future, that understanding could become not just malleable, profiting from shaping the trajectory of your curiosity; but also tradeable, your emerging uncertainties packaged as derivatives, your AI assistant potentially gambling on what you’re about to ask.

…Memory plus intent could equal something we don’t have words for yet. Emotional derivatives? Curiosity bonds? The infrastructure for trading not just information, but the anticipation of information needs. Second and third-order knowledge byproducts that make today’s quantified society look quaint.

I asked Claude and ChatGPT to connect these ideas to NeoMarketing.

We are witnessing the twilight of the attention economy and the birth of the intention economy, where AI assistants maintain persistent memory across conversations, learning not just what we ask and our preferences, but the trajectory of our curiosity over time. This represents a fundamental shift: the question is no longer who controls what we read, but who controls what we think to ask—the intention economy is where the most valuable real estate isn’t human attention but human curiosity itself.

As AI assistants gain memory, context, and synthesis capability, they no longer just respond to what users click; they begin to shape what users ask. Human curiosity itself becomes the new frontier of competition. Value migrates from content creation to the infrastructure that interprets and anticipates intention—what researchers call “the curiosity graph.” Machines intermediate between humans and information, determining not only what we see but what we want to see.

The dystopian version is already being built. Companies might soon bid not for keywords already searched but for the right to influence what you ask next, making someone curious about sustainable footwear before they realise they need new shoes—advertising could transform from persuasion to anticipation, architecting desire itself. In this world, curiosity profiles could be packaged, sold, and derivatives traded, with AI assistants potentially gambling on what you’re about to ask, creating liquidity from uncertainty itself. The risk is that commercial systems might manipulate curiosity itself, transforming intention into a tradeable asset through an invisible “intention infrastructure stack” where algorithms decide the trajectory of our thinking before we’re aware of it.

NeoMarketing provides the positive counter-architecture to this dystopian drift.

Where the manipulative intention economy seeks to manufacture curiosity, NeoMarketing responds to expressed preferences. Where surveillance systems track curiosity graphs to predict and shape future questions, BrandTwin learns through voluntary zero-party data shared because customers receive immediate value. Where platforms aim to architect desires customers don’t yet have, NeoMails deliver genuine utility that earns permission to understand authentic intentions.

The distinction is fundamental: inception versus response, extraction versus exchange, manipulation versus service, opaque versus transparent.

NeoMails act as micro-arenas of curiosity—sixty-second experiences that let users explore, learn, play, and express preferences voluntarily. Each click, quiz, or poll enriches the brand-customer dialogue rather than fuelling opaque data markets. BrandTwin, the customer’s AI representative within the brand ecosystem, ensures that curiosity remains sovereign—turning inferred intent into explicit choice. The Live Ledger ensures every interaction creates mutual value rather than extractive profit. Mu rewards make the value exchange transparent—customers know exactly what their attention and data are worth.

This is ethical intention infrastructure: owned channels, transparent data exchange, and AI that amplifies rather than exploits curiosity. Where the dystopian vision turns human questions into tradeable derivatives, NeoMarketing turns curiosity into relationship capital. Unlike attention, which is zero-sum and depletable, curiosity can grow through exercise, each question potentially spawning new questions, expanding rather than exhausting with use.

NeoMarketing chooses expansion over contraction, authentic curiosity over manufactured desire, and transparent value exchange over hidden manipulation. In this architecture, attention becomes relationship capital, and curiosity becomes the renewable resource that powers lasting, profitable growth.

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A Constellation of Thinkers – 1

I asked Claude and ChatGPT to aggregate additional relevant thinking around the intention economy and their connect to NeoMarketing.

The intention economy isn’t the vision of one thinker but a constellation of ideas converging from multiple disciplines—technology, economics, philosophy, and design. Each contributor offers a piece of the puzzle; together, they outline a civilisation-scale shift from extraction to reciprocity. NeoMarketing provides the business architecture that operationalises their ideals.

Kevin Kelly: The Flow Economy

In “The Inevitable,” Kevin Kelly describes a transition from ownership to access, from scarcity to flows. His “flow economy” mirrors the value-migration logic in the Shorenstein essay: value accrues to systems that organise and interpret flows of data and meaning rather than those that merely store static information. Kelly argues that in a world of abundance, the scarce resource isn’t content but the curation, personalisation, and real-time delivery of relevant information.

NeoMarketing connection: NeoMails are the “flow layer” for intention—continuously refreshed micro-interactions where curiosity and value circulate rather than stagnate. Each daily touchpoint creates a living stream of preference signals, not a static database. The inbox becomes a flow channel where attention compounds into intention through consistent, valuable exchanges.

Jaron Lanier: Data Dignity and Fair Compensation

Jaron Lanier warned in “Who Owns the Future?” that Big Tech’s “Siren Servers” extract data without compensating individuals, collapsing middle-class value and concentrating wealth in platform monopolies. He proposed “data dignity”—a system where users are paid for their digital exhaust, their contributions to training data, and their participation in digital economies. Without fair compensation for data, Lanier argues, we create feudal digital economies where individuals are serfs producing value they’ll never capture.

NeoMarketing connection: Mu rewards operationalise Lanier’s “data dignity” at the micro-transaction level. Customers earn transparent, immediate value for attention and data voluntarily shared via NeoMails. Every poll response, quiz completion, and preference selection generates Mu—making the value exchange explicit rather than exploitative. This isn’t surveillance capitalism rebranded; it’s genuinely reciprocal economics where both parties benefit measurably.

Michael Goldhaber: The Original Attention Economy (1997)

Michael Goldhaber predicted in 1997 that human attention, not money, would become the true currency online. His model described an economy where attention is scarce, valuable, and the ultimate constraint on information consumption. Goldhaber’s attention economy now evolves naturally into an intention economy as AI turns passive attention into active intent—shifting from “what captures your eyeballs” to “what shapes your questions.”

NeoMarketing connection: NeoMails extend Goldhaber’s logic by closing the loop between attention and economic outcome. Attention earns Mu (making the value explicit), intention triggers personalised responses (making the exchange useful), and transaction happens seamlessly when intention matures (making the relationship profitable). The progression is clean: attention → intention → transaction, with transparent value exchange at each stage.

Bret Victor: Dynamic Media for Thinking

Bret Victor’s “Dynamicland” vision and his concept of “media for thinking the unthinkable” propose tools that extend human curiosity and cognition instead of confining them. Victor argues that most digital interfaces constrain human thought to fit technological limitations rather than expanding what humans can think and do. His dynamic media vision imagines interfaces that make abstract concepts tangible, invisible patterns visible, and complex systems comprehensible.

NeoMarketing connection: NeoMails act as dynamic micro-media, turning the inbox from a static message repository into a participatory environment that stimulates curiosity rather than harvesting it. Interactive SmartBlocks—games, polls, quizzes, predictions—transform passive consumption into active exploration. Each email becomes a thinking tool, not just a communication channel, expanding what customers can discover about products, preferences, and possibilities.

Ben Shneiderman and Human-Centred AI

Ben Shneiderman’s Human-Centred AI (HCAI) framework and research from Stanford’s Human-Centred AI Institute advocate for “human control, transparency, and accountability in AI systems.” HCAI rejects the notion of fully autonomous AI making opaque decisions and instead emphasises AI as a tool that amplifies human capability whilst remaining comprehensible and controllable. The framework demands that AI systems explain their reasoning, allow human oversight, and serve human goals rather than optimise for metrics humans don’t understand or endorse.

NeoMarketing connection: BrandTwin embodies HCAI principles as an AI layer that is explainable, controllable, and accountable to both brand and customer—not an opaque recommender system. Customers understand why they receive certain recommendations (based on preferences they’ve explicitly shared). Brands understand which data drives which decisions (tracked through the Live Ledger). The AI serves the relationship, not hidden algorithmic objectives.

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A Constellation of Thinkers – 2

Frank McCourt and Project Liberty

Frank McCourt’s $500 million Project Liberty initiative builds decentralised social protocols (DSNP) that return agency to users—directly aligned with Berners-Lee’s Solid and Doc Searls’s VRM. McCourt argues that fixing underlying infrastructure is the most effective means of tackling surface problems: “The best way to solve lead poisoning in water is by replacing dangerous pipes, not the sink and tap. Systemic change happens from the bottom up.” Project Liberty now works with over 170 partner organisations, with the protocol used by approximately 14 million people.

NeoMarketing connection: NeoMails represent the commercial application layer that could run on such open rails—an interoperable “attention wallet” network for ethical engagement. Where Project Liberty builds the protocol infrastructure for decentralised social networking, NeoMarketing builds the brand-customer infrastructure for decentralised marketing relationships. Both reject platform intermediation in favour of direct, voluntary, user-controlled connections.

Robin Hanson and Prediction Markets

Robin Hanson’s work on prediction markets views them as engines of collective intention and distributed intelligence. Prediction markets aggregate dispersed knowledge by allowing participants to bet on outcomes, creating prices that reflect collective probability assessments. Hanson argues these markets reveal what people truly believe (through their willingness to risk money) rather than what they claim to believe in surveys or polls.

NeoMarketing connection: Mu could evolve beyond simple rewards into micro-prediction tokens—a curiosity marketplace rewarding accurate anticipation rather than empty impressions. Customers could stake Mu on predictions about product launches, trend forecasts, or preference outcomes, creating a genuine market for intention signals. This transforms passive data collection into active participation, where customers have skin in the game and brands gain higher-quality signals about future behaviour.

Herbert Simon: Information Creates Poverty of Attention (1971)

Before any of these thinkers, Herbert Simon (Nobel Prize 1978) established the foundational insight in 1971: “A wealth of information creates a poverty of attention,” noting that economic organisations and people needed mechanisms to receive and process large amounts of information and then pass only the relevant portion forward. Simon understood that attention, not information, was the binding constraint in information-rich environments.

NeoMarketing connection: NeoMails solve Simon’s original problem by filtering noise and delivering only what’s valuable in 60-second micro-moments. Rather than overwhelming customers with information, NeoMails curate, personalise, and compress—respecting attention scarcity whilst building intention richness. The daily format creates predictable information flow that customers can budget attention for, rather than unpredictable interruptions that tax attention unpredictably.

The B2A2C World and AI Intermediation

We’re entering a B2A2C world where entities produce information, AI consumes and processes it, then AI creates what humans actually see, with the original information becoming raw material for machines, not humans. This structural shift means brands can no longer reach customers directly through content alone—AI intermediation is inevitable. The critical question becomes: whose AI intermediates? Platform AI that optimises for platform profit, or bilateral AI (BrandTwin + personal agents like Charlie) that optimises for mutual benefit?

NeoMarketing connection: By building BrandTwins as the brand-side AI agents, NeoMarketing ensures that when customer personal AI agents (like Berners-Lee’s Charlie or Kwaai’s pAI-OS) negotiate with brands, there’s a bilateral architecture. Both sides have AI representation, both sides negotiate transparently, and both sides benefit from the exchange. This prevents platform monopolies from capturing all the value through proprietary intermediation.

Synthesis: The Architecture of Empowerment

The intention economy now spans this constellation of thinkers—Berners-Lee building the technical plumbing (Solid, Charlie), Searls defining the philosophical framework (VRM, personal AI), Lanier demanding data dignity and fair compensation, Kelly describing the flow mechanics that replace static ownership, McCourt funding the open rails that enable decentralisation, Shneiderman establishing human-centred AI principles, Victor imagining dynamic media that extends cognition, Hanson demonstrating how markets aggregate intention, and Simon providing the foundational economics of attention scarcity.

Together, they outline a civilisation-scale shift from extraction to reciprocity, from surveillance to service, from manipulation to empowerment, from platform dependence to bilateral agency.

NeoMarketing provides the business architecture that operationalises their collective ideals: NeoMails as the daily interface where curiosity compounds into intention through transparent value exchange; BrandTwin as the agentic bridge aligning AI autonomy with human purpose; Mu rewards as the operational implementation of data dignity; the Live Ledger as the accountability mechanism ensuring mutual benefit; and the entire system as commercial infrastructure that runs on open rails rather than proprietary platforms.

The intention economy isn’t inevitable—it’s a choice. The dystopian version is being built by platforms that commodify curiosity, trade intention derivatives, and manipulate desires before they form. The empowering version is being built by those who believe free customers are more valuable than captive ones, that genuine relationships beat manufactured dependencies, and that bilateral agency creates more value than unilateral extraction.

NeoMarketing chooses empowerment. It chooses transparency. It chooses bilateral architecture. It chooses the good intention economy—and provides the brand-side infrastructure to make it real.

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Key Takeaways – 1

The intention economy isn’t just philosophy—it’s a practical blueprint for escaping the $500 billion AdWaste trap. Tim Berners-Lee and Doc Searls have mapped the customer-side infrastructure; NeoMarketing provides the brand-side implementation. The convergence point is where personal AI agents expressing individual intentions meet brand systems designed to understand and serve those intentions authentically.

For marketing leaders navigating this transformation, here are the critical insights that translate intention economy principles into operational reality:

1. The Fundamental Shift: From Attention Extraction to Intention Response

The attention economy optimised for interruption and extraction—capturing eyeballs, manufacturing clicks, and monetising distraction. The intention economy optimises for listening and response—understanding genuine needs, respecting agency, and delivering mutual value.

This isn’t semantic repositioning. It’s architectural redesign. Where attention economy marketing shouts at customers hoping something sticks, intention economy marketing creates daily touchpoints that invite voluntary participation. Where attention marketing treats silence as failure, intention marketing recognises that the space between interactions is where reflection, consideration, and genuine intention form.

NeoMails embody this shift by transforming the inbox from promotional dumping ground into attention-and-intention operating system. Each daily sixty-second interaction isn’t an interruption but an invitation—SmartBlocks deliver genuine utility, BrandBlocks enable contextual discovery, ActionAds provide frictionless commerce, and Mu rewards make the value exchange transparent. This daily rhythm creates the trust infrastructure where authentic intentions can emerge and be expressed.

2. Data Sovereignty Requires Bilateral Architecture

Berners-Lee’s Solid Pods and Searls’s personal AI agents (like Kwaai’s pAI-OS) give customers control of their data and the tools to express their intentions. But markets require two sides. Customer empowerment without brand responsiveness creates asymmetry; brand systems without customer agency creates exploitation.

BrandTwins complete the bilateral architecture. While Charlie (Berners-Lee’s personal AI) works solely for the user, BrandTwin acts as the customer’s advocate within the brand ecosystem—remembering preferences, learning from interactions, predicting needs, and ensuring every touchpoint adds value. The customer’s personal AI says “I want X under these conditions.” The BrandTwin responds “Here’s how we can serve that intention while respecting your terms.”

This bilateral agency transforms the relationship from extraction (brands taking data without permission) to exchange (customers sharing data voluntarily because they receive immediate value). Zero-party data—information customers explicitly share through polls, quizzes, preference selections, and feedback—becomes the foundation for trust, creating defensible competitive advantage that survives cookie deprecation and privacy regulations.

3. Frequency Creates Familiarity; Familiarity Creates Permission

The intention economy’s most counterintuitive insight: authentic understanding requires consistent presence, not sporadic campaigns. Traditional marketing operates in bursts—weekly promotional emails, quarterly campaigns, seasonal pushes. This intermittent pattern can’t build the trust necessary for customers to share genuine intentions.

Daily touchpoints through NeoMails solve this paradox. By showing up consistently with genuine value, brands earn the permission to understand customers deeply. The first week, customers engage out of curiosity. The second week, out of habit. By the fourth week, the daily NeoMail becomes part of their routine—a trusted source of utility, entertainment, and discovery that warrants sharing preferences, answering questions, and expressing needs.

This daily presence creates the “attention rails” that make intention visible. Just as India’s UPI created digital payment rails that enabled innovation, NeoMails create relationship rails that enable brands to own customer attention again—free from platform intermediaries, algorithmic gatekeepers, and AdWaste cycles.

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Key Takeaways – 2

4. The Curiosity Graph Demands Ethical Guardrails

The Shorenstein Center’s warning is urgent: in the near future, companies might bid not for keywords already searched but for the right to shape what people ask next—architecting curiosity itself through AI intermediation. The risk isn’t hypothetical; the infrastructure for manipulating intention is being built right now.

NeoMarketing provides the ethical alternative through transparent value exchange. Where manipulative systems manufacture desire customers don’t yet have, NeoMails respond to expressed preferences. Where surveillance systems track curiosity graphs to predict and shape future questions, BrandTwins learn through voluntary data sharing rewarded immediately with Mu. Where platforms aim to create dependency through opaque algorithms, Live Ledgers track real-time P&L at individual level, ensuring mutual benefit rather than one-sided extraction.

The choice before brands is stark: participate in the dystopian curiosity marketplace where intentions become tradeable derivatives, or build the empowering infrastructure where customers control their data and brands earn understanding through genuine service. NeoMarketing chooses empowerment—not because it’s morally superior but because free customers are more valuable than captive ones.

5. Implementation Is Infrastructure, Not Features

The most critical insight from both Berners-Lee and McCourt: fixing surface problems requires rebuilding underlying infrastructure. You can’t solve lead poisoning by replacing the sink; you must replace the pipes. You can’t solve AdWaste by adding martech features; you must rebuild the marketing system.

NeoMails aren’t another email campaign tactic—they’re infrastructure for the attention economy. BrandTwins aren’t personalisation features—they’re the operating system for N=1 relationships at scale. Mu isn’t a loyalty programme—it’s currency for the intention economy. The Live Ledger isn’t a reporting dashboard—it’s the accountability mechanism that ensures marketing creates rather than destroys value.

This infrastructure orientation explains why incremental improvements to traditional email marketing fail. Adding AI-powered subject lines to batch-and-blast campaigns is like adding a spoiler to a horse-drawn carriage. The underlying architecture—weekly promotional blasts, transaction-focused messaging, attention extraction—remains fundamentally misaligned with the intention economy.

Rebuilding infrastructure is harder than adding features, but it’s the only path to sustainable competitive advantage. Early adopters will capture 3-5 years of market leadership while competitors remain trapped in attention economy thinking. By the time the laggards recognise the shift, the infrastructure advantage will be insurmountable.

The Path Forward: Choosing the Good Intention Economy

The infrastructure being built right now will determine marketing’s future for the next decade. Two paths diverge: the dystopian intention economy where platforms manipulate curiosity itself, trading intention derivatives and architecting desires before they form; and the empowering intention economy where customers control their data, express authentic intentions, and receive transparent value in exchange.

NeoMails and BrandTwins provide the brand-side architecture for the good intention economy—the one Berners-Lee, Searls, and McCourt envision. Together, they create the bilateral infrastructure where personal AI agents expressing customer intentions meet brand systems designed to understand and serve those intentions authentically.

This isn’t inevitable—it’s a choice. And the time to choose is now.

For the brands that move first, the advantages compound:

• Relationship Capital: Daily touchpoints build trust that becomes defensible competitive advantage
• Data Sovereignty: Zero-party data collection creates switching costs immune to privacy regulations
• Platform Independence: Owned channels eliminate the 20-30% revenue tax paid to intermediaries
• AdWaste Elimination: Retention mastery makes customer reacquisition increasingly unnecessary
• Margin Expansion: True personalisation increases customer lifetime value while reducing service costs

For the brands that wait, the mathematics become increasingly brutal:

• Customer expectations rise as early adopters set new standards for personalisation and value exchange
• Platform dependence deepens as owned channels atrophy from neglect
• AdWaste accelerates as reacquisition costs increase while customer patience decreases
• Competitive disadvantage widens as infrastructure gaps become insurmountable
• Margin compression continues as undifferentiated brands compete on price alone

The good intention economy won’t emerge from incremental improvements to existing systems. It requires rebuilding the infrastructure from first principles. It demands commitment to bilateral agency, transparent value exchange, and genuine service over manipulation.

But for those willing to lead this transformation, the rewards are extraordinary: sustainable competitive advantage, customer relationships that compound in value, and marketing that finally evolves from cost centre to profit engine.

The web began with a promise: this is for everyone. NeoMails and BrandTwins fulfil that promise in commerce—where customers arrive with personal AI agents expressing intentions, brands respond with systems designed to serve those intentions, and both parties benefit from voluntary relationships built on mutual respect rather than coercive dependence.

This is the future Berners-Lee envisioned. This is the future Searls championed. This is the future marketing needs.

And it begins with a simple but revolutionary act: showing up every day with something genuinely worth opening, learning from every interaction, and building relationships that honour the intention economy’s fundamental insight—that free customers are more valuable than captive ones.