When a Machine is the Customer: Rise of the AI Marketer

Marketers and salespeople often correctly say that “at the end of the day, a real person has to buy your product or service. A real person makes the decision.”

That’s always been true…until it isn’t.

Carsten Stoecker’s excellent post, “When a machine is the customer-Designing for machines,“asks the question of:

“What happens if a “real person” actually doesn’t buy your product? What happens if a machine is in the “target market” for whatever you are designing?”

I’ve had the opportunity to chat w/Carsten in the past. He was a key player at Innogy, which is driving one of the leading decentralized energy initiatives in the world. It’s impressive. Now he’s got a pretty cool start-up called Spherity, which is worth clicking over to.

Carsten obviously is a deep thinker and it comes across in his piece (and his title obviously inspired this one.)

As we look down the road at a world that sits upon open, public blockchains that drive open, public Artificial Intelligence/Machine Learning Networks and which have a 2-way relationship with a decentralized Internet-of-Things, these machines (and the AIs beneath them) are going to have a multitude of needs.

The needs will appear in nano-seconds and need to be met within nano-seconds.

How Will AIs Buy?

An autonomous car, for example, will need to decide if it stops at your house or your neighbors to rent the electricity it requires to refuel itself.

How will it make that decision?

What will the criteria be?

How will your charger station differentiate itself from the one next door to it?

• price?
• reliability?
• source of electricity (renewable vs. coal)?

All of this will happen without any people involved.

The people who made the decision, who developed the AI that power the charging station and the car were involved, but it was a long time before this actual purchase decision takes place.

It’s crazy to think about, but seems increasingly likely.

Blockchain+AI+Marketing

One of the areas I am beginning to explore is the intersection of blockchain+AI+marketing.

Think about this.

On the one hand, the charging station has an AI that optimizes for production.

On the other hand, the car has an AI that optimizes for efficient consumption.

Why couldn’t there be a Marketing AI layer that sits on top of the charging station system and conducts surveys about the “customer experience” of the autonomous vehicle?

Why couldn’t the Marketing AI layer query all of the autonomous vehicles that drive by (even if they don’t need a charge) and reward them with a small, crytpo-currency based micro-transaction to ask them a few questions about how they make decisions?

Survey question of the future: “For .00000002 ETH, will you share your purchase decision algorithm with me?”

Whoa.

Which brings me to Singularity.net

I’m still digging into it, but it looks really interesting.

They brand themselves as

“A Platform for the Decentralized AI Economy-The free and open market for AI technologies, built on smart contracts. Create, combine and monetize AI technologies at scale.”

Essentially, it’s OpenBazaar or eBay or Craigslist for AIs to go get help from each other.

When AIs Buy From Each Other

So, let’s say you have developed a world-class marketing AI algorithm that enables the charging stations in Innogy’s network to better understand the autonomous vehicles that drive by so that it can capture a greater share of the charging market in a service area.

You would put it on Singularity.net.

Then, a charging station (acting on its own) that needs a “marketing solution” because it is not performing well would come into the marketplace, find your AI, buy it, and deploy it.

There, you have a machine->machine-> machine value chain.

The charging station buys a marketing AI on Singularity.net (using its own buying criteria), deploys it, and then uses it to drive market share from the autonomous vehicles it serves.

The AI Marketer?

I guess we just discovered another skill set that marketers of the future are going to need.

The ability to design Marketing AI solutions that differentiate themselves to their target customer (in this case, charging stations) and deliver value by increasing revenue to the end customer (in this case, autonomous vehicles).