Billions of 'custobots' are coming online. Marketers may need to learn SEO for AI
- Reference: 1694496488
- News link: https://www.theregister.co.uk/2023/09/12/rise_of_the_custobots/
- Source link:
So say Gartner distinguished VP analyst Don Scheibenreif, and Mark Raskino, a fellow in in the analyst firm's CEO and Digital Business Leadership research team, in a recent book titled When Machines Become Customers .
As explained to The Register by Scheibenreif, machines-as-customers – or "custobots" as he likes to call them – are easily understood. They are like HP's Instant Ink subscription service, which sees printers advise the vendor when they're low on consumables and place an order for fresh supplies.
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The analyst believes bilions of custobots will come online in coming years, and that they will be immune to marketing's appeal to emotions.
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"Say, for example, I'm a manufacturer and I'm selling my widgets to a retail store. What if that retail store decides to outsource its negotiation function to a machine?"
[4]Google Chrome Privacy Sandbox open to all: Now websites can tap into your habits directly for ads
[5]'Millions' of spammy emails with no opt-out? That'll cost you $650K, Experian
[6]Google rebrands 'android' as 'Android' to remove any doubt about its affiliations
[7]Infosys launches 'sonic identity' – an aural logo to 'reinforce brand purpose'
A former marketer, Scheibenreif admitted that in his former life – like all marketers – he would create fear of missing out. "We [marketers] use a really cool spokesperson, or we have something else that grabs your attention. But if I'm trying to sell that product to a machine, the machine doesn't care if Beyoncé is my spokesperson."
Marketers and salespeople will therefore need to find different ways to convey information to those machines, which crave data to inform their decisions.
Scheibenreif said he's aware of an Italian vendor creating a digital marketplace for machines to shop at – so that industrial machinery that has been programmed to order commodity consumables such as lubricating oil could advertise its needs to the marketplace and then assess bids in a kind of entirely digital reverse auction.
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Another way machines become customers involves consumers creating bots to do their shopping – perhaps by having AI turn a list of meals into a shopping list. Scheibenreif said that process could be informed by a human advising a personal model of their preferred brand of commodities like pasta, but that generative AI could reach its own conclusions about brands individuals might find appealing.
Marketers fear this scenario, he said, because they will "need to figure out what the algorithm is to get into your shopping basket" – meaning how to convince the bot that one product is somehow more suited to your requirements than another. "Because if I can't figure that out, and if [the] product is not differentiated enough, then it's going to be a race to the bottom on price."
"Marketers that I talked to about this are not happy because some of their differentiated stuff is really not differentiated enough. It's all the same. It's all marketing."
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One tactic marketers may need is to influence the corpus of AI models. The aim would be to ensure the bots are keenly aware of the detail of their products – an effort akin to search engine optimization, but with AI models as the target.
If products rank highly enough, they could attract the attention of a bot consulting a generative AI for advice on the best pasta to go with your intended dinner, or the best oil to keep a physical robot in robust condition. ®
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They may be immune to marketing's appeal to emotions but if they insinuate their way into devices in the manner of HP's ink handling they might find they're not immune to a 2lb hammer (metric versions also available).
Why use BASIC when you can use AI?
> having AI turn a list of meals into a shopping list. Scheibenreif said that process could be informed by a human advising a personal model of their preferred brand of commodities like pasta, but that generative AI could reach its own conclusions about brands individuals might find appealing.
Seriously?
There were simple programs in BASIC for 80s home computers that turned your weekly menu choices into a shopping list. You could even do the inverse and get suggestions for what to make with what you have in the fridge right now. You do not need to waste power on any form of AI to do that task!
Especially not a generative AI - what are you expecting it to generate? A new and innovative way to make something that looks like stroganoff but is almost, but not quite, entirely unlike stroganoff?
Re: Why use BASIC when you can use AI?
Clever boy.
Scheibenreif nerd-sniped me into ranting about inappropriate use of tech and totally diverted my attention from his real concern, ensuring the continued fetishisation of "brands".
what the algorithm is to get into your shopping basket
Easy. Given that most basic foods are essentially indistinguishable out of their packets - think potatoes, rice, pasta, beans, frozen peas - the algorithm is 'reduce the price'.
I find it fascinating that my local (DE) supermarket has its own brand beans at 69c, it's expensive brand at 99c, 'outside' brands around 1.99, and Heinz for 2.59 or thereabouts. For some reason, the own brand shelves empty first and most frequently. The same applies to the various rice brands available, the various pastas and so on.
Re: what the algorithm is to get into your shopping basket
Different varieties of potato and different brands of pasta have very different flavours and textures. Even frozen peas have some variations in tenderness and sweetness.
"Marketers that I talked to about this are not happy because some of their differentiated stuff is really not differentiated enough. It's all the same. It's all marketing."
Anything that fucks with marketers must be a good thing.
If it's all the same, then it's capitalism at work, isn't it ?
Anything that gets the bullshit out of the way is positive for me.
Marketers may need to learn SEO for AI
Just carpet-bomb the custobots with ads, as they do with us meatbags, and see what happens!
Re: Marketers may need to learn SEO for AI
What happens is ad-blockers.
> they will be immune to marketing's appeal to emotions.
Why would you think that? Have they actually used ChatGPT and its ilk for more than five minutes? They are trained on human-generated data. They can detect, react to and fake emotions, and it's actually kinda hard to prevent them from doing so.
It sounds to me like the analyst is still conditioned by old sci-fi movies where the AI is strictly all logic. That's not really the behavior exhibited by LLMs.
And the printer calling home for ink is not an AI, and it's not a LLM. It's barely an algorithm. It's, like, two lines of code. There's no need, or possibility, to try to market to it. It's an extremely poor example of the kind of "custobot" that is then described. I don't think the "custobot" exists yet, or if it does then hardly anyone uses it.
I don't see this situation changing soon, either, because generative AIs are intrinsically unreliable, and I'm not going to hand my credit card details to something that might decide at any moment to buy junk just because the junk was somewhere in the training set and a random float came up 0.0001.