Prepping your asset management website for a whole different kind of user
Key takeaways:
- Asset management websites exist to support task completion.
- Autonomous agents have the potential to bring new meaning to self-service.
- Optimization efforts likely will need to shift toward supporting journey mapping and efficient data exchange.
There are a few pieces I can point to that made a dramatic impact on my understanding of what happens on the web. I can remember where I was when I read them for the first time.
They include:
- Tim O’Reilly’s What is Web 2.0 from 20 years ago (!)
- Digital Body Language, 2009 masterpiece by Steven Woods, co-founder of Eloqua
- Google Analytics Breakthrough, a sentimental favorite only partly because my nephew picked it out for me in an airport in 2016. I mean, who voluntarily adds a 600-page hardcover book to his backpack while traveling? Only a special guy.
Last week I came across a blog post that’s taken up full-time rent-free residence in my head. At 500 words, it doesn’t compare to the heft of the above. But it packs a punch and has implications for all of us building and maintaining websites in anticipation of human visitors. Let me provide some context and see if you agree.
Putting the pieces together
What do we know about users of investment company websites, which until only recently (see post on anticipating retail investors) have been primarily used by business users?
“Your visitors are there to complete a task, they’re not there for fun, they just need to get something done.” I have repeated that line so many times—and that includes to marketers bragging about session durations. Maybe extended visits are a measure of a terrific site, and then again maybe they’re a sign that things take a while to find on that site (which has been one of J.D. Power’s conclusions over the years).
We know that one of the great appeals of AI is productivity gains. Across the board, business is celebrating the activities that AI can perform, freeing up their highly paid professionals. This was a theme at a recent Lowe Group Office Hours.
Count financial advisors at the head of the line of businesspeople looking to find more hours in their day, typically to spend with clients or on client work. This is what I was getting at last year with our blog post predicting that advisors would likely use AI to screen and summarize their emails. Not so long ago we discussed the importance of LLMs being able to make sense of your product pages, in particular.
All of the above come together and are clarified in this post The Agentic Web: Your Website Is About to Become a Workflow. Its tight thesis:
“Every major platform is racing to disintermediate or eliminate traditional web interactions. Your customers won’t visit your site. Their agents will.”
Big gulp.
Building a website for autonomous agents
Author Shelly Palmer, professor of Advanced Media in Residence at Syracuse University’s S.I. Newhouse School of Public Communications and CEO of The Palmer Group, elaborates on his view of how websites in the not-distant future will support autonomous interactions by agents.
“Agents don’t need to be persuaded, they need data structures that meet their requirements,” says Palmer. “An agentic funnel starts with machine readable product data, exposed APIs, and clear success criteria an agent can verify. The companies that understand this difference will capture unprecedented market share. Their competitors will be optimizing for ghosts.”
Palmer describes several of what he calls strategic imperatives, a few of which I’ve excerpted below:
- Journey mapping of customer actions that drive the most revenue to prioritize a clearing the way for the agents.
- Data architecture audit including structuring pricing data for programmatic consumption. “If an agent can’t parse your value proposition in milliseconds, you won’t make the sale,” Palmer writes.
- API-first commerce capable of handling an entire transaction lifecycle. “One call: product details, availability, pricing, tax calculation, order placement, confirmation.”
How much will we know about the visitors?
Way back when, websites were offered to facilitate self-service 24/7—for the time it was the ultimate in convenience, but you still had to do the browsing yourself. This is an evolution, transformation really, that replaces self with your own mini-me to get things done for you.
All this makes sense to me. Commerce isn’t what happens on asset manager sites, of course. But it’s easy to see how autonomous agents could make quick work of visiting multiple product provider sites, scraping fund data, downloading fact sheets and summarizing whitepapers. No doubt they’ll be smart enough to subscribe to email newsletters. Will they watch the videos—which are increasingly of avatars as portfolio managers? Not to be flip.
If you’ve been laboring over a digital engagement strategy that assumes human advisors engaging with your website, this might dash some of your motivation. But, hear me out, what if the agent visits are all able to be identified and linked to the humans who sent them?
Just spitballing, I asked Gemini Pro what information might accompany AI agent visits. For what it’s worth (no citations were provided), here’s the response:
“In the most sophisticated future, a website might
- Identify an incoming request as an AI agent via its user-agent string or other signals.
- Prompt the agent for specific credentials or a declared purpose (if it's not already authorized).”
If today you’re intent on linking advisor visits to their contact profile in your CRM as a means of capturing interest signals for Sales to tune their outreach, it sounds like it might still be possible to pass such information on in the future. The difference would be that the visitor would be the agent with credentials synced to a CRM contact? Maybe, not sure? If so, that could result in a comprehensive approach to recognizing every visitor, a certain improvement over sites' reliances on cookies today.
Don’t leave this to IT
So, so many questions. How do we go from here to there? How long will do we have? When do we start? Are there initiatives we're pursuing today that should be redirected or even scrubbed? Oh and what about graphic design—do AI agents even notice?
Palmer closes his post with a message that’s music to my ears: Figuring out how your website supports workflow isn’t an initiative to delegate to IT.
“This is your iPhone moment except the window is measured in weeks, not years. The companies that dominated mobile didn’t build smaller websites; they created entirely new ways to interact with their content.
…Every assumption about user experience, customer journey, and digital marketing must be challenged. The winners won’t be those who optimize for agents, they’ll be those who rebuild their entire value chain around autonomous interactions.”
If the future plays out as predicted, this transformation will consume considerable resources. At the same time, however, and based on what’s understood today, websites will need to continue to support human interaction for exploration and experiences that won’t be assigned to agents.
Read Palmer’s post in full, at least a few times. We’d love to hear your thoughts and about the plans you might be making that we could help you think through.
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