Could industrial machines represent the next evolution of customers? With the use of advanced Internet of Things (IoT) devices and industry’s acceptance of as-a-service business models, machines are poised to make their own buying decisions, according to a new book from Gartner, “When Machines Become Customers,” by Don Scheibenreif, vice president analyst, and Mark Raskino, vice president analyst, at Gartner.
Their research explains how smart machines will soon be involved in a wide range of consumer and business purchases, leaving machine builders the opportunity to sell a lot more than a programmable machine. Imagine a world of machines that make decisions for the business, informed and scientific decisions based on more knowledge than a human could ever comprehend.
“The machine customer era has already begun,” Scheibenreif said. “There are more machines with the potential to act as buyers than humans on the planet. Today, there are more than 9.7 billion installed IoT devices, including equipment monitoring, surveillance cameras, connected cars, smart lighting, tablets, smartwatches, smart speaker and connected printers. Each of these has a steadily improving ability to analyze information and make decisions. Every IoT-enabled product could become a customer. In fact, Gartner predicts that by 2027 50% of people in advanced economies will have AI personal assistants working for them every day.”
In a factory, it's also been labeled autonomous or lights-out manufacturing, where not only could the machines think and act for themselves, but the environment and building infrastructure could adjust automatically to optimize production with no human intervention.
The machine evolution will happen in three phases, and, according to the book, we’re already in the first phase, in which products or services automatically perform limited functions as co-customers on an owner’s behalf, such as Amazon Dash Replenishment and Tesla’s automobiles. People set the rules, and machines execute them within that prescribed ecosystem. The authors call these machines “bound customers.”
In the second, emerging phase, people still set the rules for machines as “adaptable customers,” said Raskino, “although AI technology can choose and act on behalf of a human with minimal intervention for select tasks.” Examples include robotrading and autonomous vehicle systems.
In the third stage, machines are “autonomous customers” with enough intelligence to act independently on behalf of humans. The machines have a high degree of discretion and own most of the process steps associated with a transaction.
“What the machine customers from each phase have in common is that they will make decisions differently from humans in three ways,” said Scheibenreif. “They are logical and will make decisions based on rules that may or may not be transparent. Second, they can also process large amounts of information. Lastly, machines focus on completing tasks efficiently and without emotion, and they can’t be influenced by being wined and dined.”
