By Mark Raskino
Generative AI is accelerating the trend of machines becoming customers. While AI bot replacements for employees might do as you say, AI-enabled machine customers- nonhuman economic actors that obtain goods and services in exchange for payment- will do as they see fit. If you serve them well, they can grow your addressable market. If you ignore their needs, you may not even see them walk away.
Digital-savvy business leaders can do these five things today to appeal to machine customers and their sizable wallets as their population grows and they become more sophisticated, powerful, and independent decision makers and transactors.
No. 1: Make all your product and service information easily accessible to AI-powered customers.
Machine customers may be searching on 100 different variables, and you need to supply data for all of them, depending on where they are in the purchase process. Provide and encourage API access, and make sure CAPTCHA and other bot-thwarting tools are not shutting out legitimate machine customer revenue.
No. 2: Add machine customers to your core digital commerce and sales strategy.
Strive to be exceptional at digital commerce, including all digital touchpoints, such as social media, mobile apps and chatbots. Machine customers will start appearing in these spaces.
Furthermore, consider the impact of these buyers on the way you sell and provide information. For example, consider creating a machine customer platform to interact with third parties through automated log-owner permissions and preferences, manage and initiate tasks and facilitate payment receipts.
No. 3: Develop a strong commercial partnership between sales, marketing, supply chain, IT and analytics.
Ensure your cross-functional team creates one to three scenarios that explore what happens when AI-enabled machine customers start buying from you. The supply chain must be agile enough to respond to unexpected demand patterns.
No. 4: Start hiring and training sales and service staff to work with AI agents.
Sales and service staff need to understand and possibly crack the algorithms that drive machine customers’ purchase behaviour or after-sale service demands. These employees need a basic understanding of how an AI-driven purchaser functions. Some positions may even require a data science background.
No. 5: Alert and train customer-facing staff to spot machine customers.
Bots powered by generative AI’s large language models may already be posing as humans and trying to negotiate, book and buy from you through text-chat-based customer service lines, and perhaps even via telephone calls using high-quality voice synthesis. Their buying behaviour is logical and rational. In some cases, decades of insight and training in marketing and selling to human customers may suddenly become irrelevant.
This article is contributed by Mark Raskino, Distinguished VP Analyst at Gartner, who is also the author of the book ‘When Machines Become Customer’.
Additional analysis on use cases of Generative AI will be presented during Gartner IT Symposium/Xpo 2023, Kochi, November 28-30.
(The author is Mark Raskino, Distinguished VP Analyst at Gartner, and the views expressed in this article are his own)
