# In the Age of AI: Let the Customers Own It

*September 27, 2026*

> Source: https://sentity.co/notes/2026-09-27.html
> Author: Jason (@JasonSentity)
> Notes are not edited after publication.

Vanguard is the most quietly radical company in American finance. It has no outside shareholders. The funds own the company, and the people who invest in the funds own the funds. So when Vanguard gets more efficient, there is nobody standing between the savings and the customer — the savings show up as lower fees. That one structural choice has done more for ordinary investors than almost anything else in the industry.

I want a lot more of that, and I think the age of AI makes it urgent. This note is a call for **customer-owned companies** — not everywhere, but in the parts of the market where the structure fits.

The idea is simple. The customers are the owners. You pay in — a membership, a subscription, a premium — and that makes you an owner. The company exists to serve the people who own it, who happen to be the same people it sells to. Whatever it earns beyond what it needs to run and grow goes back to them, as a dividend or as a lower price. The pressure to run lean does not go away. It just points at the customer instead of at a separate class of owners who never buy the product.

Where it fits: businesses with a long, recurring customer relationship, a product that is close to a commodity, and incumbents whose easiest way to make more money is to charge you more for the same thing.

- **Financial services.** The obvious one. Vanguard proved it for funds and credit unions proved it for banking. Brokerage, retirement accounts, mortgages — all of it is a scale business where the customer should be the one who gets the scale.
- **Insurance.** Insurance is already a pool of members sharing risk. The mutual structure is old and it matches the product: premiums beyond what claims and reserves need should come back to the people who paid them.
- **Grocery.** Costco has already shown that people will pay a membership fee to shop somewhere that keeps margins thin. Take the next step and make the members the owners. A subscription grocer that pays its surplus back to the households that shop there.

Why now? First, so there is no confusion: **I am a capitalist, and I love it.** My own principles say bet on America, and I mean it. Markets, competition and ownership are the most powerful engine for creating wealth the world has ever seen. Nothing in this note is an argument against them.

But AI changes what that engine produces and who it produces it for. We are heading into a world where superintelligence does a large share of the work — the analysis, the coding, the service, eventually much of the physical labour too. That is an extraordinary amount of abundance. The question is where it goes. If it flows only to the owners of the largest companies, we get what we already see accelerating: huge corporations and the people who own them getting richer and richer, while the customers who pay them share in none of it. That is not a failure of capitalism. It is capitalism with the ownership in too few hands, at a moment when ownership is about to matter more than wages.

We need ways to share that abundance that still work like capitalism. **Mutual benefit companies are one.** When the customers are the owners, the efficiency AI creates does not stop at the shareholder — it comes back to the people who buy the product, as lower prices and as dividends. A mutual still competes, still has to win customers, still pays for performance. It keeps the incentives of capitalism and drops the excess.

And to be clear about pay: **the executives should be paid very well.** Great managers cost money, and they are worth it. A mutual that underpays its leadership will get mediocre leadership and lose to the for-profit down the street. Pay them like the operators they are, and tie that pay to what the owners actually get — lower costs, better service, bigger dividends.

The mission is also an advantage. A lot of talented people are chasing more than the maximum possible dollar. Offer them excellent pay and a company whose whole reason for existing is the people it serves, and you will hire people that a pure profit-maximiser cannot.

The honest objections. Capital is the hard one: without outside equity, a mutual grows from retained earnings and member contributions, and that is slow. And without a share price, a mutual can go sleepy — plenty of old mutual insurers drifted until someone demutualised them. The answer is members with real votes, real transparency, and management paid on member outcomes. None of that is easy. Vanguard shows it can be done.

So this is the call. If you are building in one of these markets, decide the ownership structure before you design the product. Let the customers own it. I would sign up as a customer — and gladly as an owner.