Most digital teams believe they understand their customers.
They can see engagement inside their app, track conversion funnels, measure retention, and model lifetime value. What they can’t see is where those same customers go next—or who else is influencing the decision long before a brand ever shows up.
That gap sat at the center of the first episode of After the Download: Journeys in the App Universe, where RealityMine CEO Chris Havemann spoke with co-founder Rolfe Swinton and COO Chris Shaw about how consumer behavior, competition, and data access are changing in the digital economy. What emerged wasn’t a list of trends, but a deeper question: what does “knowing your customer” even mean now?
Below are the themes from the conversation that matter most for anyone building, operating, or competing in digital markets.
One of the clearest throughlines in the conversation was how dramatically the data landscape has narrowed. As Chris Shaw reflected, a decade ago tracking was largely implicit. Cookies, embedded software, and background analytics made cross-platform visibility feel almost routine.
That world is gone.
Today’s privacy-first environment has locked behavioral data inside ecosystems. Every major platform has become exceptionally good at understanding what happens within its own walls—and almost blind to everything outside them.
The strategic risk isn’t just missing data. It’s mistaking partial visibility for truth.
As Chris Havemann pointed out, this becomes especially dangerous as markets mature. In high-growth categories, revenue can rise even while share quietly erodes. Once growth slows, competition turns zero-sum. At that point, not knowing how consumers behave across alternatives isn’t a gap—it’s a liability.
You can’t defend share you can’t see.
The most unsettling shift discussed wasn’t hypothetical. It’s already happening.
Rolfe Swinton shared how, when planning a recent trip, he deployed AI agents to compare prices and options across platforms. The outcome was simple: the agent found the best deal, and brand loyalty never entered the equation.
That moment crystallizes a larger change. When consumers delegate decision-making to AI, preference gives way to optimization. As Havemann put it, the agent doesn’t care about your loyalty program.
This reframes competition entirely. Brands are no longer just competing for human attention. They’re competing to be selected by algorithms.
Rolfe described this as the emergence of “two webs”: one designed for people, and one designed for machines. The agentic web doesn’t respond to storytelling or emotional resonance. It responds to structure, clarity, and measurable differentiation. If your brand isn’t surfaced there, the relationship you thought you had may not matter when it counts.
That same shift is reshaping discovery.
Traditional SEO assumes abundance—pages of results, multiple paths to consideration. But as AI increasingly mediates search, that abundance disappears. Instead of ten blue links, consumers may see three options, chosen on their behalf.
As Rolfe noted in the discussion, the question is no longer “How do we rank?” but “How do we get chosen?”
This isn’t a marketing problem alone. It’s a strategic one. When visibility itself is scarce, being excluded from the curated set means being invisible at the moment of decision.
The group also revisited a foundational question: what makes behavioral data trustworthy?
Rolfe shared an early RealityMine proof point that still resonates. When measuring device behavior, one of the strongest indicators that people had returned to “normal” usage patterns was visits to adult content sites. The takeaway wasn’t sensational—it was methodological. Once people forget they’re being observed, behavior stabilizes.
That’s the difference between stated intent and lived reality.
As Havemann noted, the value lies in the purity of the signal. Surveys and self-reporting capture what people think they do, or want to say they do. Passive behavioral data shows what actually happens—across apps, platforms, and moments of choice.
In an AI-mediated world, that distinction becomes critical.
Chris Shaw offered perspective on how radically the role of apps has changed. Early in the app economy, the app was the product. Flappy Bird is a famous example—so valuable at its peak that phones with the app installed sold above market price after it was pulled.
Today, the app is rarely the destination. It’s the interface for engagement, monetization, and retention. It’s how brands bypass ad blockers, maintain presence, and fight for attention in a finite pool of consumer time.
That shift intensifies competition. Time consolidates into fewer core platforms, while those platforms expand horizontally into commerce, media, and services. The battlegrounds aren’t theoretical anymore. They’re forming in real time.
Looking ahead, the conversation turned to AI itself. Beyond copyright and ownership debates, Rolfe raised a more fundamental concern: models trained on stale or self-referential data deteriorate. They hallucinate. They lose relevance.
The implication is straightforward but uncomfortable. AI systems don’t just need more data. They need continuous, permissioned, real-world behavioral data to stay grounded.
For organizations relying on AI-driven insights, this raises hard questions. How current is the data feeding your models? How representative? How validated?
Trust doesn’t come from scale alone.
The conversation kept circling back to one idea. In a world where consumers maintain multiple parallel relationships, switch effortlessly, and increasingly outsource decisions to AI, first-party data tells only part of the story.
It shows what happens with you. It doesn’t show what happens instead of you.
As Chris Shaw framed it, the challenge isn’t collecting more data—it’s understanding the real relationship you have with consumers when all alternatives are considered.
That’s the gap this episode exposes. And it’s why the discussion doesn’t resolve neatly.
To hear the full conversation with Chris Havemann, Rolfe Swinton, and Chris Shaw—including where they disagree, what they’re still questioning, and how these shifts connect to RealityMine’s origins—listen to the first episode of After the Download: Journeys in the App Universe.
