Machine customers represent the biggest new growth opportunity of the decade, but they don’t make decisions the way humans do. As more increasingly smart devices are connected to the internet and more people use intelligent virtual assistants such as Siri and Cortana, the commercial possibilities are staggering. Trillions of dollars will progressively slide into the hands — or should we say processors — of nonhumans.
That would suggest a market shift roughly twice as large and twice as fast as the historical arrival of e-commerce.such as HP Instant Ink, Amazon Dash Replenishment and Tesla’s automobiles can automatically perform limited functions as a “co-customer” on the owner’s behalf. People set the rules, and the machine executes them within a specific and prescribed ecosystem. These machines are therefore “bound customers,” and they represent the first in a three-phase evolution.
What the machine customers from each phase have in common is that they will make decisions differently from humans in three ways. These differences have significant commercial and operational impacts:— to a point. Machines are logic- and rule-based. Their motivation is to solve a problem. Their assumptions will be visible in their rules and queries as well as the decisions they make. Humans often keep their intentions hidden during the buying process.