The US research firm Gartner is gearing up for the arrival of machine customers, aka custobots. These AI-driven programs have the ability to buy and sell products automatically. Gartner experts indicate that business leaders can already implement five strategies to attract these increasingly numerous customers of the future.
- Make all product and service information custobot-accessible
- Custobots can use hundreds of different variables to conduct a search. Therefore, data should be provided for all of them. Moreover, the variables change depending on the stage of the purchasing process.
- Businesses should offer and promote access to application programming interfaces (APIs). Additionally, they must ensure that anti-bot tools like CAPTCHAs do not block custobots from accessing their sites.
- Include custobots in sales and digital commerce strategies
- To excel in digital commerce, efforts should focus on all touch points — social media, mobile apps and chatbots — and even leverage technologies like conversational AI. Custobots are expected to start appearing in these spaces.
- Another aspect to consider is creating a platform for custobots to interact with third parties through automated permissions and preferences, manage and initiate tasks and make payments.
- Establish links between sales, marketing, IT, analytics and the supply chain
- A multidisciplinary team should create one to three scenarios that explore what happens when custobots purchase products from the company.
- The supply chain must be flexible enough to pivot to unexpected demand patterns.
- Hire and train sales and service staff to work with AI agents
- Employees need to understand and possibly decipher the algorithms that govern custobots’ purchasing behaviour and after-sales service demands.
- To achieve this, it is necessary to grasp how these agents operate. Some positions may require experience in data science.
- Prepare customer service to identify custobots
- Bots fuelled by large language models and GenAI might already be posing as humans to negotiate, book and purchase products through chats or phone calls employing high-quality voice synthesis.
- Custobots’ buying behaviour is purely logical and rational. In certain cases, training in marketing and sales for human customers could even become irrelevant.
According to Mark Raskino, a Gartner Fellow in the CEO and Digital Business Leadership research team, AI-powered custobots “do as they see fit. If you serve them well, they can grow your addressable market.” However, “if you ignore their needs, you may not even see them walk away,” says Raskino, an expert in business and technology trends and their implications for business models, leadership and executive relationships.