When Machines Become Customers: Ready or not, AI enabled non-human customers are coming to your business. How you adapt will make or break your future.

by Don Scheibenreif, Mark Raskino

For thousands of years, customers have been individual humans, families or organisations. But soon, intelligent software and hardware machines will start to act as customers. First they will shop for us, later they will act for themselves. You can’t take them to dinner, and they won’t fall for your slogans, but they might help grow your market – if you know how.

Companies are already being called on the phone by software that sounds like a person. Cars will buy their own fuel and tires. That smart speaker in every home can become the housekeeper and shopper for the family it serves. Get ready for the rise of machine customers.

When Machines Become Customers is the first book to lay out this profound change to business in the 21st century. Treat it as your field guide and survival manual.

233 pages, Paperback

Published January 4, 2023

Reviews

[John McDermott · Rating 5 out of 5]

As a B2B marketer, I read with interest a topic that is going to turn the established sales and marketing world upside down.  Two "holy cow" moments raced to the front of my thinking; which for nearly 40 years have been the bedrock of my marketing successes. First, how will I present my content to a machine customer in order to have the human decision-maker support purchasing my product?  Secondly, I wondered, how will key messages that normally surround a level of emotional need be affected by the expansion of machine decision making?   I was hooked on the book after reading the first chapter and know that others will as well.  There is a balance of explanation, theory, and reflection to see how we moved from yesterday to today as a basis for where we are going.  The authors did a superb job in taking an abstract idea and making it understandable for the non-techy common marketer like me.

[Dewayne · Rating 4 out of 5]

I am not sure the term machine as customer will stick, but I do believe in the definition of the trend which simply states machines or algorithms will soon act on our behalf as we delegate purchasing behaviors and decision rights. The relevance of this book is seen by many examples such as HP instaprint, Alexa, Bart, and numerous Copilot branded items filling our newsfeed. I found this read extremely informative as a business leader who seeks to contribute to our progress as a society while also being an enthusiastic consumer. It is written in true Gartner fashion which means keep in mind it's researched well with many scenarios that still need to play out across numerous factors. They thing to capture are some of the things that just maybe possible. Personally I enjoyed this stretch thinking.

[Jacob Lewis · Rating 2 out of 5]

Parts of it will stick with me but honestly was too provocative- great book club conversations though!