Today, generative AI is all the rage. In the news, it’s everywhere. As a result, the emergence of machine customers has probably not grabbed your attention as generative AI has.
Machine customers are connected, increasingly smart devices that possess the ability to purchase goods and services for your organization.
While “machine customers” is the most common term used to describe these contraptions (another is “custobots”), I think a more accurate and descriptive term is “digital purchasing agents.” But that’s me. 😉
How consequential are machine customers predicted to be? Gartner has chosen machine customers as one of its top 10 strategic technology trends for 2024. Machine customers are a leading strategic technology trend, according to Gartner, for three reasons:
- For the first time in human history, companies will be able to make their own customers
- By 2028, 15 billion connected products will exist with the potential to behave as customers, with billions more to follow in the coming years
- Machine customers will impact trillions of dollars in purchases by 2030 and eventually become more significant than the arrival of digital commerce
Gartner expects the evolution of machine customers to involve three distinct phases: bound customers, adaptable customers, and autonomous customers.
The current first phase features bound customers, whereby a digital purchasing agent is led by a human but follows a set of well-defined rules to purchase specific goods or services. In the second, not-so-distant phase, adaptable customers will emerge. Co-lead by humans, a digital purchasing agent evaluates competing products and makes the best purchase based on a set of rules. In the third phase, machine customers will be autonomous and purchase goods and services based on a set of rules, contexts, and preferences. These autonomous customers will also purchase items such as maintenance and software updates to ensure their own needs are met. Not only will they be truly autonomous, but these machines will also evolve and learn from newly available data and their experiences.
The business impact during this second phase will be heady. By 2028, machine customers will make 20% of human-readable storefronts obsolete, according to Gartner, because machine customers, not humans, will increasingly be purchasing goods and services.
Embracing Tomorrow’s Technology Today
In this brave new world of digital purchasing agents, the amount of disruption will be formidable. How technology companies advertise, price, and sell their goods and services will be affected. They will still be selling to humans, but increasingly their customers will be digital purchasing agents, and these agents will evaluate the tech companies’ goods based on a predetermined set of rules, not on human emotions or manipulative pricing strategies.
Of course, machine customers will require lots of data, and the data will need to be accurate, current, and digestible for machine customers to make informed purchasing decisions.
One of today’s prime examples of a machine customer is HP Instant Ink. With an Instant Ink subscription, an HP printer automatically orders a new ink cartridge when it is running low on ink, and the cartridge is delivered automatically. There’s no need for a human to be involved with monitoring ink consumption or ordering a new cartridge once the subscription is set up.
To prepare for the future, Gartner advises organizations to ask themselves strategic questions about customer machines, such as:
Will you manufacture them?
Will you build a platform to serve them?
Will you join a marketplace to sell to them?
What capabilities will you need in any case?
As a business or IT leader, now is the time to start taking digital purchasing agents seriously and continually educate yourself about them.
