Newance Labs Follow the work ↗
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Independent research into personal intelligence

Your preferences
belong to you.
Not the platforms.

Newance Labs explores the trust layer for the agentic era: preference profiles that travel with you from service to service—and consumer agents that can finally take your side.

Zurich · Switzerland Scroll to explore ↓
Every click teaches a system.
But almost none of those systems work for you.
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The question

What changes when preference becomes personal property?

Today, merchants, platforms and marketplaces each hold a partial model of what you want. Their model improves as you use them. Your understanding of yourself does not.

The result is a strange asymmetry: the most intimate layer of digital commerce—your evolving taste—is fragmented across companies whose incentives are not the same as yours.

We think preference intelligence should sit on the other side of the table.

In an agentic world, that difference becomes tangible. A consumer agent can only truly represent a person when its memory, judgement and incentives belong to that person—not to the platform sending it into the market.

FROM EXTRACTION TO ALIGNMENT

Platform-owned models

Your signals leave you.

External models compound

Customer-owned models

Your model stays with you.

Your agent carries your model into the market
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What we explore

The technology that lets an agent know you—without anyone owning you.

01 / MEMORY

Portable preference models

Representations of taste that can grow across conversations, contexts and categories without becoming the property of any one platform.

02 / CONTROL

Customer-held intelligence

Architectures in which the person decides what is remembered, what is shared and which systems may use it.

03 / TRUST

Verifiable alignment

Recommendation systems whose commercial incentives cannot silently alter what they tell the person they serve.

04 / AGENCY

Consumer agents with a side

Agents that turn a person’s private preference model into action: searching, choosing, explaining and negotiating across services while remaining loyal to the customer.

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The consumer agent is where preference becomes power: not a dossier about you, but an intelligence that can act for you.
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Three non-negotiables

Trust is not a tone of voice.
It is a system constraint.

01

The person owns the profile.

Not merely an export. Not a settings page. Real control over the intelligence accumulated in their name.

02

Advice is independent by design.

Commercial terms belong after the recommendation, never inside the reasoning that creates it.

03

Understanding crosses contexts.

A relationship can travel from wine to books, scent or fashion—even when category expertise cannot.

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Where the research becomes real

Consumer agents that know whose side they are on.

A preference profile is not the product people experience. The agent is.

It remembers what matters, asks when context is missing, searches beyond a single merchant and explains why a choice fits. It can speak to shops, platforms and other agents—without becoming an extension of any of them.

This is the tangible outcome of our work: agents that carry a customer-owned model into the market and use it to act with continuity, discretion and judgement.

NEWANCE /ˈnjuː.əns/

A new nuance.
A finer model of what a person means.

Newance Labs is an independent research initiative exploring the protocols, product patterns and economic structures behind trustworthy consumer agents and customer-owned preference intelligence.

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Open research

Follow the questions as they become prototypes.

We will publish working notes, experiments and occasional invitations for collaborators.