Your smart fridge knows your grocery habits and scans items regularly to place orders when you run out of mayo, ketchup, or other condiments. That’s an example of a machine customer. While you are still the end-consumer, machines purchase for you and add another layer of convenience. However, the rise of machine customers may change e-commerce drastically.
As mentioned above, anything from your Samsung smart fridge to your Amazon Dash scanner counts as machine customers. It’s essentially a device that uses IoT (Internet of Things) sensors and AI (Artificial Intelligence) to make smart purchase decisions for you autonomously. While the Amazon Dash scanner isn’t a true machine customer, its future iterations may be.
How did the machine customer impact on ecommerce happen? Gartner outlines an evolution trajectory of machine customers in three different stages –
Machine customers are devices that do the shopping for you. Instead of you clicking “buy,” the machine realizes it’s running low on something and handles the transaction itself. Here’s what machine customer examples look like in everyday life:
Imagine your printer ordering its own ink before you run out, or a washing machine that detects you’re low on detergent and has a new jug arrive at your door. These “customers” monitor their own supplies, so you don’t have to.
Modern cars are becoming their own digital wallets. An electric vehicle can pull up to a charging station, “talk” to the charger, and pay the bill automatically. They can even handle tolls or pay for parking without you ever reaching for a credit card.
In the corporate world, smart software acts as a buyer. Some large retailers use AI to negotiate prices with suppliers or manage inventory. These bots look at the data, decide what’s needed, and strike a deal in seconds.
Smart home systems can now “shop” for electricity. They might wait to run the dishwasher until power is cheapest or sell extra solar energy back to the grid, acting like a tiny, automated stock trader for your utilities.
Some of you already have stepped foot into the future with smart fridges, smart printers, and similar gadgets in your home. You never run out of ink in the middle of printing and your favorite condiments are always stocked in the refrigerator.
Moreover, you don’t need to waste any time or energy on these redundant and repetitive purchases. This new level of efficiency and convenience is a glaring benefit of AI in customer service.
Inventory management is challenging, and that’s why several tech companies make custom inventory management software for logistics and e-commerce businesses. Unfortunately, that still doesn’t get rid of the machine customers development service complexities and requires highly skilled individuals to operate that software and get help from data analytics tools to keep things running smoothly.
AI implementation in businesscan add machine customers to solve this issue and make inventory management simple and affordable for even small factories and brick-and-mortar stores.
Many types of machine customers can predict future demand, analyze sales data, and take into account logistical and manufacturing hurdles to always have the right items stocked in their inventory. They can even make delivery hubs more efficient and make one-day delivery more accessible.
Presently, e-commerce giants know more about your shopping behavior than you and recommend amazing product suggestions. As AI evolves and these systems get better and more accurate, machine customers can take over to deliver personalized purchase experiences. Wouldn’t it be great if machine customers could predict when your power bank may malfunction and deliver a new one to you before the next camping trip? This benefit of a personalized shopping experience just makes life easier!
Marketers and product designers would have to account for machine customers in business decisions. As machine customers slowly take over your shopping cart, e-commerce pages and marketing materials must be optimized for both humans and machines.
Machine customers bring a lot of benefits. However, it’s also important to be aware of the security, transparency, and other challenges posed by them. How about you? Do you think machine customers would bring a revolution in e-commerce and make big impacts like AR and VR? Or, would they make us hand more decision-making power to our AI overlords? Let us know in the comments.
The way we choose products is going to change. Right now, we might pick a brand because we like the packaging or saw a cool ad. But a machine customer doesn’t care about “vibes”. It only cares about specs, price, and reviews.
This means businesses will have to work harder on the actual quality and value of their products rather than just flashy marketing. If your smart coffee maker is programmed to find the best-rated organic beans at the lowest price, it won’t get distracted by a pretty label. It forces brands to be more honest and consistent because they’re trying to convince a logic-driven bot instead of an impulsive human.
Machine customers bring a lot of benefits. However, it’s also important to be aware of the security, transparency, and other challenges posed by them. How about you? Do you think machine customers would bring a revolution in e-commerce and make a big impact like AR and VR? Or, would they make us hand more decision-making power to our AI overlords? Let us know in the comments.
Mr. Robert Willson is one of the few geeks who never gets tired when it comes to technology. From the latest gadgets to AI and machine learning, Mr. Willson translates them into easy-to-digest insights. Where there is tech, there is him!
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