When Your AI Becomes You: Don Tapscott on the Future of Identity

As AI moves from helpful tool to ever-present companion, what does that mean for how we work, lead, and stay in control? In his new book You to the Power of Two, Don Tapscott argues we’re entering the age of Identic AI—digital extensions of ourselves that can think, act, and even negotiate on our behalf.

In this episode, World Trade Centre Toronto VP Jon Worren sits down with Don to explore how Identic AI could transform business, reshape personal identity, and test our ability to build technology we can trust. From the future of executive work to the question of who owns our digital selves, this is a conversation about what’s coming and why Canada needs to get ahead of it.

The World Trade Centre Toronto’s AI Business Catalyst (AIBC) helps small and mid-sized businesses in southern Ontario explore how artificial intelligence can support smarter decision-making and drive growth. Through targeted learning and expert advisory, AIBC helps businesses identify where AI fits, understand available tools, and build a plan to implement them—regardless of industry.

https://bot.com/AI-Business-Catalyst

Transcript

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You know, if this thing develops its own sense of values and morality and interests and escapes us, then we're walking around in a world with these gods that may, rather than being something that are divine, they could be the demonic. Don Topscott says we're stepping into a new kind of AI, One that doesn't just assist us, but starts to take part in our lives. In his new book, You to the Power of Two, Don and his co-author, Joseph Bradley, call this shift, Identic AI. It's the idea that as our digital identities grow smarter, AI becomes a kind of ever-present companion, helping us get things done, supporting our well-being, and sometimes stepping in before we even realize what we need. Today on Toronto Talks, the Vice President of the Board's World Trade Centre Toronto, John Warren, sits down with Don Tapscott to explore what Identic AI really means for all of us and how we stay in control as this new era begins. Welcome Don, it's a pleasure to have you here. You have for many decades now been helping business leaders make sense of major technologies. You've talked about digital technology, about Wikinomics, about blockchain. Now we're talking about AI. What are the things that in AI drew you to specifically to sit down and think deeply about this topic? Well, we began exploring the intersection between blockchain and AI, and I started researching where is AI going to go? And we came up with this revelation that is explained in the book that most people don't understand, and there are no books about this, that we had a whole period of generative AI. And the world was awoken to AI by that new chat GPT and so on that it generates information, text, data, financial information, graphics, music. And then that was based on that. We had a whole period called agentic AI, and that was about agents. You didn't have to prompt AI to do something. An agent could take action by itself. They execute tasks and so on under certain rules and requirements, and agents are everywhere. They're in financial systems, call centers when you call up, supply chains, manufacturing. but it occurred to us, the really important agents, the ones that are going to transform everything are personal agents, the digital version of us, extension of us. People call them digital twins, but they're not because your digital extension could have an IQ of a thousand. So, and this has happened to me a few times in my life where I thought, wow, this is the next big thing in technology. Nobody knows anything about it. There's no book about it. So I teamed up with Joseph Bradley, who's a technology executive and AI expert, and we wrote this. Amazing. And what is Identic AI? Because I think that's a term that not a lot of people are familiar with that you're introducing here to help us think about AI. Identic AI is a neologism. It's a newly invented word. And I've come up with a few of these over the years. Some of them stick, some of them don't. It's important that this sticks because there's no term to describe this. Basically, think of a scenario. You wake up, beetles, you get out of bed and drag a comb across your head. And before you've gone downstairs to take a cup, your agent is already working with you. It tells you about your sleep, recommends a different exercise routine. It's searched all the news and pulled up a couple of articles that really matter. It's not only planned out your day, but by the time you're doing your commute, it's solved a bunch of problems. problems in the production process solved. We had some customer issues solved. We have a new opportunity. I pre-negotiated a deal for your approval. And Peter Diamantes, who is the founder of X-Prize, in an interview, he says to me, he's got what he calls Peter Bott, and he says, it's like having an infinite number of vice presidents. They're attending conferences for you. They're running around solving problems, dealing with HR things, and so on. And that's just the beginning. That's sort of work. So this is a new era where Identic Agents will be your consigliere, your infinite number of assistants and executives, and developers and editors, but also your doctors. It's been to every medical school in the world. your tutor is literally a know-it-all. This, to me, is the future of AI. It's not yet explained or discussed, and it's going to change every business, every organization, every country, but it's also going to change us, the way that we work and play and live, and the way that we think as well. So, So there's some big challenges. Yeah. And big opportunities. Oh, for sure. How do you deal with having a superpower? Well, I could ask Superman if he was a lot of them. He's not. I wouldn't recommend jumping out the window here. It's not going to help you with that. Fair enough. Fair enough. It may give you a bunch of arguments on why that would be a dumb thing. Yeah. So it's not going to give me winks just yet. All right. So, but, you know, in thinking about this, I think many people, including myself, is like, okay, well, what's left for me to do as an executive? So can you paint a picture of what the day looks like for an executive? Like, what is like having somebody act on your behalf or something act on your behalf? Like, what's left for you? And like, how do you add value as a human being? because I think there is inherent resistance among many layers of people in the business world because they're worried about AI and taking away jobs. All right. Well, let's unpack that because there are a bunch of questions. Yes. Are they worried? They probably should be. If you have an infinite number of vice presidents, you don't need actual vice presidents, right? a significant number of editors. First, I mean, 90% of programming, according to Eric Schmidt, will be done by AI next year in 2026. So we sent all these kids off to university and we told them, you get a practical job. Don't take a useless degree like studying the humanities or liberal arts or whatever. So they all took computer science and now what? So we can come back to that, the role of the university. But what's left for you? Well, first of all, it depends. Have you really developed this agent or not? In the future, companies, and I'm not talking 20 years out, I'm talking next year, companies will not only look at your resume, they'll look at your agent. You could have someone fresh out of school with a fantastic, agent who's more capable than a seasoned executive. And then all kinds of interesting issues like what's left for us. During the internet period, we all made implicit choices about what we were going to store on board and what we'd let the web store. So now I don't to remember that. I can Google it, right? I remember I was in London. That was 15 years ago. And I was going to this really tiny little place on the street with five buildings, houses. And I was like, "I'm going to 13 Wifflepot Lane." And the guy says, "Right." And he goes, he said, "Remember every street. Well, now Uber drivers, of course, don't do that. They'll take you some crazy route to Wiffle Pot Lane, but setting that aside, we all don't think about so much the location because we know we have GPS to get it. That's outsourcing memory. Well, now we're going to be outsourcing thinking and intelligence. Am I going to think about this or am I going to let my agent think about it because they're way smarter. So is that going to charge us up and bring our thinking to a new level? Or if we do it wrong, is it going to dumb us down? Or we'll just get lazy? You think about that and you find that and you solve that problem because I don't have to do it. So there are many, many tough issues like this. For sure. For sure. I mean, that's so interesting because I had a friend who changed jobs recently. She came from a very technology-forward organization to one which was much more relationship-oriented. In her luggage, so to say, she had seven agents. And this new organization that prepared for her onboarding program, the task that she was going to do, that was going to take her two weeks. She was done before the afternoon was over because she had agents and they had no concept that this work could happen so quickly. But think about it. The people that have that kind of capability in terms of job workers, their competitiveness versus somebody who's kind of old school and doesn't understand identity AI. Yeah. And I thought of it for myself, we run a program here to help companies adopt AI. And I'm thinking as I'm adding to my team, well, what does the job profile look like of a future hire? And I said to HR, I'd like somebody who comes with an HR. That would be awesome. Because that not only shows that they understand where we're at, but they also come with that additional superpower, as you mentioned earlier. I'm still not getting much luck in the job market. I might have to wait a little bit, or I may even have to go younger, I'm thinking, in the market for that. But there is one element left for the humans, don't you think, where is if the grunt work, everything is taken away from us, relationships still going on. Yeah, I think that's true. But it's not just a great work. It's going to be taken away. It's going to be some of the higher level problem solving that executives do. So to me, what's important in the future is not just what you know, because your agent can know everything. We go to university to learn, acquire knowledge, right? I don't think that's going to be so important. You have to master certain things, but what's way more important is the development of these underlying capabilities. Your ability to think critically, to see the big picture, to see the interrelationship between your BS detector. Because so much of this stuff is just not true. Your ability to collaborate, your passion for doing research, and your capability for managing the superpower that you have. These are the kinds of things that will be really important. And in the universities, I'm a strong believer, by the way, of a liberal arts undergraduate education. I always was. Yeah. Yeah. Now. Because we not only need people who know about things, we need people who can think. And also we need citizens in this new world. And it's going to be really important, a new kind of citizen emergence. So what's the future MBA going to look like to be useful in that kind of setting? Well, think about it. I mean, our whole concept of management. Yeah. You know, Peter Drucker. We have thousands of management schools and business schools. We have tens of thousands of professors. We probably have hundreds of thousands of books. But this all assumes a whole bunch of stuff. It assumes this traditional, vertically integrated, somewhat hierarchical organization. And it also assumes that people are managing people. Yeah. Not that people who have extraordinary onboard capability, but people who are managing people that have superpowers as well. So most of what we know about management, I think, is going to change. Because the whole paradigm is a mental model. They put boundaries around what we think they constrain our actions. They're often based on assumptions that are so strong that we don't know that they're there. And the paradigm of what is management, I think it's changing fundamentally. I'm working with a couple of business schools right now. I'll try and think through what that means. Very interesting. Yeah. Yeah, it's fascinating. And I agree with you. I think the liberal arts is going to be stronger because language is so important between these models. And really understanding and articulating precision when you're interacting with the machine is going to be. Yeah, absolutely. still need human judgment. Like, okay, write me a letter to this important customer, and you still have to look it over. And chances are that letter's got something really wrong with it. It's not the tone isn't quite right or something. But we need people who can work in this new environment. A much smaller analogy, or a few that I've been through in the past, I mean, 1982, my first book, it was about how everyone was going to use a computer connected to a vast network of networks. And it described the functionality of Microsoft Office. We actually built that back then at Bell Northern Research. We did controlled experiments with groups that had this technology and groups with a pen and a piece of paper and a secretary and then took the phone, telephone and face-to-face meetings. And the group that had the technology did much better. And that was a big change. Then we saw the rise of the internet where it wasn't just about using multi-function workstations, it was your ability to share information globally and to communicate globally. And then there have been a series of these big changes like this that I've tried to document, but I can't think of anything. Blockchain here is another one. I mean, we wrote the big book that sort of explained that this isn't just about Bitcoin. The underlying technology is the real pony here. But I can't think of anything that compares to what we're talking about today and the impact of Identic AI on everything is staggering once you get into it. It's true. It does feel different. I remember starting to use email at some early point in my career. Before that, I used couriers to deal with my marketing agency and whatnot. And suddenly I could send things with an email. But that's an identifiable process with just a better solution. That's a good way of describing. But here, I'm not sure we quite understand where the AI is going. And I think that's at least for a lot of the executives that I work with, that's finding it hard to envision exactly how AI is going to operate inside of the business. Well, also today people think AI, Oh, that's tools, right? Or that's a bunch of apps or things in the supply chain, or it's good for analyzing customer data and marketing intelligences. But all of that is changing. And now it's going to be an extension of you. So that's why we call it "identic AI." It's really about your identity. Let me just explain that. So digital identity, you would know. Most people thought of that and still do as identification, right? I got the right credentials to go across the border or drive a car or get into a bar or whatever. But then that was replaced over the last 15 years by a bigger concept, which is identity as having data. So you leave a trail of digital crumbs as you travel throughout life and they create a mirror image of you. And virtually, you may know more about you than you do, because you can't remember your exact location a year ago or what you bought or which medication you had or diagnosis you had, dozens of categories of data. And you create this data, but it gets expropriated from you by these giant technology corporations. The Magnificent Seven on NILISTAC has a market value of $21 trillion dollars, which is bigger than Europe. It's bigger than the GDP of the EU. So they harvest our data. It's like feudalism. We create the asset. They take most of it away. We're left with a few digital cabbages. So now there's a third stage to identity that's starting to happen, which is that identity that's all that data is getting an IQ. So that's kind of a big issue here. Who's going to own your new digital identity, which is not just all your data, it's your extended intelligence? Yeah. Meta? For sure. Google? For sure. Well, this is the big argument in the book is that no, the digital John needs to be owned by John. You need a self-sovereign, identity AI. That's something that's technically feasible and it's also socially achievable as well. For sure. But if you also extrapolate that and say, Jason and I, we work here at this organization, we're all using AI and leaving these digital prompts and you accumulate that, who owns that? Because that is a pretty good... Within the organization? Well, in the world, right? Let's say we all use something like a chart GPT. And chart GPT would know an awful lot about what's going on. Chart GPT is the tip of the iceberg in terms of what I'm talking about. Yeah. So you need to hold it. Yeah. And there's an angle on this that's especially important for Canadians. Now, Canada's, let's say it, under attack right now. The president wants to use economic force to cause us to collapse and give up on our sovereign nation and become part of the U.S. It's such a preposterous idea and so offensive to Canadians, but it's a real thing. And so we need to build a prosperous, productive, but also a resilient economy as well that can withstand these kinds of threats. And the challenge here is like even in the U.S. is a big issue. Who should own the digital me? But in Canada, should it be owned not just by large technology companies, American technology? Yeah. Yeah. Like there's a thing in Canada, the big sur government, about something called data sovereignty. Yeah. So any data that's in the Canadian system, personal data, government data, business data, if it runs on software that's owned by an American company or a platform that's American, a judge in the United States can demand that that data be released. Yeah. So, oh, that's a problem. Yeah. So this is a big national thing for Canadians, even more for Americans, although it's a big challenge for them as well, which is to recapture not just their data, but their extended intellect and know-how. Yeah. And ability to think and solve problems in the world. Yeah. These are very important topics. Of course, sovereign AI is older. Every conversation I feel at the moment. I think it's on many people's mind. I'm wondering from your perspective, are we in a position to control this or is the technology that the Americans have so advanced that we, that translept. That's a killer question. Yeah. My view is the future is not something to be predicted. It's something to be achieved. And we have a view that this problem is solvable. Now, it's a modest little thing that has to be done. We need to rebuild the entire architecture of artificial intelligence around a decentralized model. And in the book we outline, what does that mean? Technically, how could that work? It's not really for technical people. It's really for a non-fiction audience, which I guess is better than a fiction audience. But that could be achieved through a number of things. Decentralized physical infrastructure. It's called DPN. It's blockchain. It uses all the computers in the world to process AI. Decentralized data fabric. solves a big problem about ownership, decentralized large language models. Now, it doesn't mean that you know, open AI or whatever, that technology is going to go away. There's a rule for it. But the key thing is in a new architecture, I get control and I own me. I own the digital extension of me. This is technically achievable, but you pose another sort of implicit question, which is, well, sort of economically and socially, how is this achievable? And one of the few benefits of being older is, I've seen it all. In the '70s, the bunch dominated everything. where it was Univac and Sierra Control Data Honeywell and IBM. And the only one that got through that was IBM. They're now not even a computer company, they're certainly software and services. But then there were the mini computer companies in the 80s. Well, in the late 70s and

early 80s. So there were a dozen: 25:03

Data General, Four Phase, Datapoint, Wang, and so on, all gone. The only one that got through that was HP and it figured out we're not a mini computer company. Then there was the PC companies dominated by the IBM PC. Well, that's gone. And then on and on. We saw the rise of the internet and there were the big internet juggernauts. Most of them are now gone. Then we saw the rise of social media. you know, I don't think I'm telling stories out at school, but I was in Davos and I kept hearing my assistant was calling me, "This guy, Mark Zuckerberg, wants to meet with you from Facebook." So I sat down with him and one of the other Facebook founders, and his first thing was he wanted me to sign his copy of Wikonomics. And I wondered, "What's wrong with this picture? he's got a social network with 30 million people and I wrote a book anyway. And he asked me what do you think we should really be doing with Facebook. But one of the things he wanted to change was on the front cover it was all about collaborative innovation and so on. So we had Linux and we had the Human Genome Project and we had a social media company and it was called Not Netscape. MySpace. And he said, "Is there another issue of the book coming out?" Because I think you might want to think about having MySpace there. And I thought at the time, MySpace is killing it. But sure enough, the next edition of the book at Facebook on the cover. But then you've got the banks and the big financial system. We wrote Blockchain revolution. I was in a session at Davos with 50 CEOs of the largest banks in the world. I was explaining this and I got so much fly from them that this is just not going to happen. Blockchain, no way. And of course, they were threatened by what it means. I mean, we're going to have stable coins in Canada and they replace a lot of what the banks do. So the point I'm making, sort of a bit law is that leaders of old paradigms have difficulty embracing the new, and new models can emerge from the edge. So this book is not just a book, it's sort of a kind of, I don't know, manifesto for a movement. I mean, I'm done writing books, I'm now going to create a movement around this, because I think the stakes are really, really high that we get sovereignty back. Yeah. It's certainly an important conversation, not just for the actual application and use of the data, but in the context of our time and what's going on. I'm curious, just sort of in the writing of the book, did you make any surprise discoveries? Is there anything that you hadn't thought of in the process of just going through? Everything was a surprise. We didn't even know what to call this thing. I kept thinking, digital identity, it's not just agentic AI, it's something else. I thought,"Identic AI." I sort of noticed my co-op, Joseph, and he's like, "That's the term." But everywhere in the book, every day I was like, "Wow, look at this." And "Wow, could this go that way?" And "Wow, what does this mean?" And "Wow, this creates a set of problems." And so on. One of the ones that's really interesting, and I don't want to give it all away, but I was thinking, Yuval Noah Herrera wrote "Sapiens" and then he said, "Humans aspire to be deities. And then I happened to be listening to a playlist and this song came on, "What if God were one of us?" Just a stranger on the bus. And I thought, "God, you have an IQ, extended IQ of a thousand. This is what we think of as a God. Gods, they're not just all powerful, they're all-knowing, They remember everything. They forget nothing. They fear nothing, least of all death. They have this grand capture of reality that's sort of indistinguishable from magic. This came to me one night. I was sitting there as these things do, and I wrote this big chunk of them book in about an hour. It just came out. But imagine if we have these godlike capabilities, if we could harness them, that's an extraordinary thing for solving many of the big intractable problems that we faced as individuals and as a society. But if we don't, if this thing develops its own sense of values and morality and interests and escapes us, then we're walking around in a world with these gods that may rather than being something that are divine, they could be the demonic. This is an extraordinary danger and threat really to civilization. All the more important that we get control of these agents and that we infuse them with our values and our legitimate expectations and our sense of what's right or wrong. We bake integrity into the way that we act. And maybe this, I don't know, smarter world than my grandchildren here it might actually be a better one. What do you think is getting in way of so much potential here, both for good and for bad, for business leaders that are thinking about AI and what they can do for their business? What do you think is getting in way of them actually putting clues? Well, the main thing getting in way is there's weirdly nothing about identity AI yet. Okay. They have one thing that they can do to understand this right now. This will change, of course, which is to read the book. You to the Power of Two. Yes, exactly. And Joseph Bradley. Anyway, they all think that AI is something that it is, but they don't understand what the real important use of AI is. That it's not just about a tool. It's not about apps. It's not even about agentic AI. It's about the extension of our own capabilities. It's part of the human experience. And just as a final question, what do you take? You talk to dozens of business leaders and executives about this all the time. Who does it right? What is the characteristic of executives that are getting this technology? Right. Well, they have certain characteristics. They're quite clear. They're curious. They're open to learning. They're typically not the command and control type executives. I have a vision and I'll create this vision and sell it down to the organization. They want to create an organization that can learn, which is kind of good because the person at the top can't learn for the organization as a whole anymore. Now, that's not my insight. That's from a guy named Peter Senge years ago in a book called The Fifth Discipline. And I can spot it in a sec if I walk into an executive area and just sort of what it looks like. And people, yeah, my people. Just terms like that are sort of a giveaway. In terms of who does it right, well, right now there are little pockets of companies that are starting to get this self-sovereign, Identic AI idea. I'll tell you one, and I have no commercial interest in this, but my co-author, Joseph Bradley, is building a platform for Identic AI where you get to have a self-sovereign AI. You get to own your data and the extension of your intelligence. And sometime early in the new year, two things will happen. One is I'll go on stage with me and digital me. And digital media answers some questions that I can't. I don't know what I said in the digital economy in chapter eight about the transformation of traditional media, exactly what I said. But he's also created this whole deal, this whole platform whereby there's a contract and quite in detail. I'm going to write an article about it. And I think it'll be a big deal because this will be a template for what all companies in this space should be doing and how they should approach their customers. You want to build trust in the market. And I wrote a book about this and it took me, what is trust? It took me two months to write a sentence, but I read everything about trust. And I think that trust is really the expectation that the other party will act with integrity. Yeah. Know that they will do the right thing, that they'll be honest, that they'll consider the interest, in this case, of their customers. Yeah. You know, that they will, it's not just about us and our shareholders who make lots of money. We care. It's about abiding by your commitments and it's about openness, having a degree of transparency, the expression, what are they hiding? It shows the relationship between transparency and trust. If I'm hiding something, I don't know if I can be trusted. So integrity, I think, will become and should become a new theme for all these technology companies, that we are not just about creating massive shareholder wealth. We're going to care about our consumers and about civilization. And we're going a model of AI that is actually workable. Because if they don't, I don't think business can succeed in a world that's disintegrating. So this is a practical kind of choice that all of them will have to fix over the next period. I hope it's sooner rather than later. You mentioned shareholder value. Do you think we're in a bubble? Well, we are for sure. You spend your time thinking far ahead, a long time ahead. Stock markets are the actual thromer. Yeah. The thing about bubbles is you never know when they're going to burst. Yeah, exactly. But it is and it isn't because right now there's this bubble based on AI. but people have a limited view of what AI can do. Imagine if every human is going to have a digital self. That exponentially increases the market for AI companies. Now, a big disruptor to that, of course, will be the movement that we're going to build and are building around a decentralization of AI and the reinvention of the AI stack. And the companies that get with that program, I think will be the ones that get through the next big turmoil. That is a big element of the trust that you mentioned just a little while ago, that there is an infrastructure that underpins that. That's right. That can help maintain the trust for them. And there are people that, when I listen to adoption and the rate of which AI can be introduced into a company. They say adoption moves at the rate of trust. And so you've got to have the infrastructure that supports that. Trust is the expectation that you're locked with integrity, that you're going to do the right thing. So all of you big AI companies out there do the right thing because trust is a sine qua non, it's their environment. Don, thank you so much. This is great. Don's new book with Joseph Bradley, You to the Power of Two, is on sale now. If you enjoyed today's episode, make sure you subscribe. We're always talking to interesting people. 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