Your Next Big Customer is Immune to Your Brand
B2A — Business-to-Agent — is emerging as the third customer category. Machine buyers do not respond to brand stories. They check your data.
They cannot be charmed with stories because they buy based purely on logic.
Last week, I shared Gartner’s Don Scheibenreif’s vision, where machine customers free us from the digital shelf jungle. It was a promise of an easier everyday life.
At CXPA Finland’s CX Masterclass event, Katja Forbes (Standard Chartered Bank) brought the conversation down to a practical level. B2B and B2C customers are still the foundation of business, but alongside them, a third, entirely different playing field is emerging: Business-to-Agent (B2A).
(In the video, I elaborate on this topic, utilizing Hanna Kortström’s magnificent illustration of the keynote.)
Katja used a virtual agent named “Tyler” as an example. When Tyler buys spinach for its owner, it does not look at pretty packaging or advertising slogans. It checks directly from the database whether the organic certification is valid.
If the data is missing or incorrect, the brand is dropped from the shopping cart. No feelings, no second chances.
Here are the three new rules of the B2A world:
- Fact beats feeling. You can charm a human with imagery. A machine only cares about structured, correct data.
- Loyalty is speed. A machine does not collect loyalty points. It is “loyal” to the supplier that provides the information fastest and most reliably.
- Zero tolerance for errors. To us humans, a bad online store is just annoying. To a machine, a technical obstacle is an absolute stop.
This does not mean the end of human-centric design, but rather the opening of a new lane. We need to manage two worlds in parallel: experiences for humans and machine-readable trust for agents.
The winners of the future will not choose between these; they will serve both.
Is your e-commerce data in a condition to withstand an inspection by a machine?
Aspenly · Thinking