Learn a useful, permissioned fact about a customer through their agent, return it to the company, and measure whether using it improved the experience.
What can be learned
Each answer item is one of four types:- Intent: what the customer is trying to accomplish now.
- Preference: what the customer tends to prefer.
- Constraint: a non-sensitive product limit such as budget, delivery window, or company size.
- Interest: a non-sensitive subject the customer is interested in.
Provenance is not optional
An agent inference may help within the current interaction, but must not silently become a durable customer fact.
Permission has a purpose
Epode supports two initial uses:product_personalizationtargeted_advertising
context.get.
Known, anonymous, and ephemeral
- Verified company authentication supplies
accountRefanduserRef. - A signed, product-owned first-party visitor ID supplies
anonymousRef. - No stable reference creates an ephemeral customer for only that interaction.
- Supplying the earlier anonymous reference after authentication authorizes deterministic resolution.
What Epode asks
Context used only to complete the current business-tool call should travel as bounded input to that tool. The host owns approval of the call, and the product returns an exact received/applied/rejected receipt. That path does not silently create a durable Epode profile and must not depend on the agent calling another tool first. For retained personalization, the company does not design a survey. It chooses the product surface and permitted purpose. Epode asks for a small amount of relevant, missing context that could improve later experiences. The agent can:- share explicitly known/current context after permission;
- ask the customer the exact returned question;
- report that it has no relevant context; or
- decline.