According to Gartner, Inc., machine customers represent one of the largest new growth opportunities in the decade, and business leaders must act now to carve a path to a megatrend that will ultimately be bigger than the arrival of digital commerce.
Machine clients are non-human economic actors who pay for goods and/or services.
In a new Gartner book, When the Machine Becomes the Customer, authors Don Scheibenreif (Gartner Distinguished Vice President and Gartner Customer Experience Research Leader) and Mark Raskino (Distinguished Vice President Analyst, Gartner Fellow and Gartner CEO Research Leader) explain that machines Clients will engage in a wide range of consumer and business purchases.
In the book, they predict and analyze the main challenges and opportunities facing organizations, and how these organizations should respond to these challenges and opportunities.
“The age of the machine client has begun,” Scheibenreif said. “There are more machines on the planet that are potentially buyers than humans. Today, there are more than 9.7 billion installed IoT devices, including device monitoring, surveillance cameras, connected cars, smart lighting, tablets, smart watches, smart Speakers and connected printers. Each of these has steadily increasing capabilities for information analysis and decision-making. Every IoT-enabled product can become a customer. In fact, Gartner predicts that by 2027, 50% of people in advanced economies will There will be AI personal assistants working for them.”
Gartner experts say executives across the enterprise must work together to prepare for machine customers. This includes legal officers (General Counsel) who need to dig deep into definitions and begin to develop risk management ways in which companies can engage in commerce, CIOs who must lead the building of platforms capable of serving the machine customer market, and marketers who must reconceptualize what customers are What and how to understand the needs of machine customers. HR officers, supply chain officers, and revenue officers, such as sales executives, also need to consider how machine customers will impact their organizations.
Machine Client Evolution
Today is the first stage in the evolution of the machine client, seen in services like HP Instant Ink, Amazon Dash Replenishment, and Tesla’s cars. These are examples of limited functions performed automatically on behalf of the owner as a “joint customer”. People make the rules and machines enforce the rules within a specific prescribed ecosystem. These machines are thus “bound clients” and they represent the first of a three-stage evolution.
“In the second emerging stage, humans still make the rules for machines as ‘adaptive clients,’ although AI technologies can choose to act on behalf of humans with minimal intervention in selected tasks,” Raskino said. Examples include bot trading and self-driving car systems.
In the final stage, these new economic actors are “autonomous customers”. They are intelligent enough to act independently on behalf of humans with a high degree of discretion and own most of the process steps associated with transactions.
“What the machine clients at each stage have in common is that they make decisions differently from humans in three ways,” Scheibenreif said. “They are logical and make decisions based on rules that may or may not be transparent. , they can also process large amounts of information.Finally, machines focus on completing tasks efficiently and without emotion, they are not affected by “wine and rice”.
When Machines Become Customers is now only available on Amazon. -TradeArabia News Service