If machines start buying on their own

Who buys for us
We are used to thinking of ourselves as the main actors of our purchases, people who consciously buy goods and services based on will or necessity and in complete freedom.
For now, this is the case, but things are about to change rapidly, as a new player is entering this economic ecosystem that involves the exchange of money, our money, for products and services: artificial intelligence algorithms.

In a way, this is already happening; we delegate some expenses to automatisms that we are aware of, but which we tend to ignore for convenience: when we set up a direct debit for a bill on a bank account, for example, we are authorizing a machine (the bank’s information systems) to pay the bill amount for us based on a certain flow of data from the provider. It is a method we use to automate the process and to avoid having to deal with the payment ourselves. The same thing happens when we make a periodic purchase on Amazon: at the agreed deadline, the systems automatically pay for the product and we receive it at home, as if we had placed a traditional order. Here too, the goal of automation is to simplify the process: I don’t want to worry about buying dishwasher tablets every month, so I use an automation that will do it for me.

The Machine Customer
This model is called “Machine Customer” and, according to Gartner, by 2030, 22% of the total revenue from our purchases will be made in a completely automatic way. In other words: nearly a quarter of the money we use will be spent automatically by algorithms we delegate. The more automation enters our homes, the easier it will be to delegate to machines not only the operational part of their role in our homes but also the economic transactions.
On the other hand, if we think about it, purchasing procedures are often a nuisance that we cannot do without.
Sure, if I have to buy a new guitar, I will go to the store, try as many as I want, and leave with the instrument that gave me the best vibes and feelings.
But if I have to buy dishwasher tablets, it’s just a nuisance. It’s a product whose stock should never go below a certain threshold and, for equal quality, I’m interested in saving what I can, but it’s certainly not a purchase based on passion.
The term “Machine Customers” refers to the idea that machines, driven by advanced algorithms and artificial intelligence, can act as autonomous clients, with the goal of simplifying the users’ lives.

How it works
Let’s think about when we park our car on the “beloved” blue lines of paid parking: in the best-case scenario, we have to use an app on our smartphone to activate the parking when we arrive and deactivate it when we leave. Not to mention parking meters, coins, magnetic cards, paper slips, scratch cards, and all those wonders of the last century that we often have to deal with to pay for an hour of parking. In some very rare cases, the car, if modern enough, might have an onboard functionality to make the payment independently, maybe after asking for confirmation from the user.
The model is exactly this: algorithms, in this case onboard the car, that independently understand that there is an expense to pay (the parking) and, maybe after asking for confirmation from the user, proceed to make the payment. User confirmation certainly increases security, but it introduces additional steps that the end user might not even want to perform. The great advantage of automation is that it solves the problem for the end user without them even noticing.

What awaits us in the future
The car that pays for parking by itself is a tiny example of what will be possible in the future and is feasible today with the use of little technology.
We will have refrigerators and pantries capable of autonomously detecting the stocks of certain products that we never want to run out of at home, and when stocks are too low, they will take care of ordering and paying for these products in total autonomy, with the aim of never running out of milk in the refrigerator or cookies in the pantry. Even the delivery and placement will be completely automatable so that the end user, in practice, will never notice a drop in stocks. In my latest book “Augmented Lives”, there is plenty of other examples of how automation will enter our lives.
We will have appliances capable of autonomously scheduling periodic maintenance, printers that order paper and ink on their own, voice assistants capable of booking and paying for all kinds of services, from hotels to restaurants to tourist attraction tickets, all with the goal of simplifying the lives of end users, up to Universal Digital Assistants.
What will change for companies
The first thing to consider is that “Machine Customers” will soon represent a new type of buyer, but reaching them will require complete technological integration. In other words: if I want to sell a product whose purchase can be completely automated (like the dishwasher tablets we talked about earlier or the milk to put in the fridge), I will have to ensure that these new consumers can easily access my virtual store, thus entering a digital ecosystem where automatic buyers and virtual stores can talk to each other without problems, ensuring accuracy of service and security of transactions.
One thing is certain: companies that do not provide this service will lose this market share, which could become very large in perspective.
On the other hand, conversely, there will be sales platforms completely dedicated to automatic buyers, new forms of commerce that will radically change the concept of e-commerce itself and that will have enormous influences on the advertising market. Indeed, it is still not clear if and how it will be possible to produce some form of advertising that can somehow affect the choices made by artificial intelligence algorithms.

The human factor
Over time, we have become accustomed to giving machines more and more decision-making freedom, it is not at all clear if this lightness can be achieved also on such a complex component of our life as our shopping habits.
It is very likely that, at least in the beginning, we will have many doubts and will want to be aware of every single purchase, confirming it explicitly and delving into the logic of the algorithms. Until we reach a point where, when these mechanisms are well-oiled, our trust will increase, and we will begin to deactivate, one by one, all notifications and confirmation requests.

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