Soon, machines will be your customers. Here’s how to lead the shift.

AI news is dominating work-related newsfeeds, replacing contact centre agents, and simplifying customer lives.

Yet hardly anyone talks about the curveballs AI-powered customers are about to throw at brands and vendors, or how these changes will redefine the experiences businesses need to deliver.

Just as you’re outsourcing your marketing and processes to machines, your customers will soon delegate parts of their purchasing decisions to virtual buying clones.

Consider this:

• 82% of fashion consumers want AI to reduce the time they spend researching what to buy (Business of Fashion/McKinsey, December 2024).
• By 2027, 50% of people in advanced economies will have AI personal assistants working for them daily (Gartner, 2023)
• 89% of B2B customers already use genAI in at least one part of their purchasing process (Forrester, November 2024)

And these numbers are only going up. Analysts predict the global AI Agents market will grow at a CAGR of  40.5% from 2024 to 2029 (Global Market Estimate, January 2025).

So I decided to summarise my thoughts in this first post of 2025.

The rise of machine customers isn’t the plot of a distant sci-fi scenario. It’s happening now. Today, printers are already reordering ink. Soon, they’ll be shopping for the best deal—even calling your dealers to negotiate bulk discounts.
They’ll also be interacting with your chatbots and contacting your customer service staff for support requests. If you're curious how this feels, check out www.boardy.ai—it’s both fascinating and unsettling.

​The impact of this development on customer relationships cannot be overstated.

All my career, I’ve helped organisations create and capture customer value through experiences that tap into human needs—rationally, emotionally, aspirationally, and even spiritually. But that bag of tricks goes out the window when computers knock on the door.

So, how do we prepare ?
As a conversation starter, I developed the below Agentic Experience Framework to help clarify the readiness of your business for a world where machine customers do part of your customer’s job.

It’s my first prototype.
So it's a work in progress. But writing it was helpful to me, so I hope it sparks some thoughts on your end. If you have suggestions, improvements, or yes-and comments, I’d love to hear them. We can all learn from each other.

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The Agentic Experience Framework

The framework’s design centres on three levels to guide an organisation’s response to the rise of machine customers.

• Establish the foundations: build the technical and organisational groundwork.
• Recalibrate the experience: adapt to serve both machine and human customers.
• Take leadership: be the one that starts the conversation with customers, employees and your market​.

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1. Establish the foundations

​To successfully serve machine customers, you need a solid base. Data, trust, and infrastructure aren’t just buzzwords—they’re table stakes in an agentic economy where algorithms will reward or penalise you for any inconsistency, incompleteness, or complexity.

All the teams in your business now need to talk computer. This means:

👉 Data readiness: Get your data house in order
Machine customers don’t browse or "get a feel" for your brand. They consume data—feeding every manual, review, product spec, and sustainability report into their decision algorithms. If you’re in professional services, they might even read your Glassdoor reviews and call your HR department.

To play the game, your data must be easily accessible, real-time and formatted for easy processing and comparison.

And if your data doesn’t align? The bots will find out—whether from an inconsistent webpage you forgot to delete or conflicting responses from your customer service team.

👉 Trust signals: Ensure the agents believe your statements
Bots are programmed to mistrust the internet, so your data must be authentic and verifiable. Think third-party data verifiers, blockchain-based authentication, ISO-style certifications.

Either way, incomplete or unverified sources will get lower algorithmic weight at best—or be ignored altogether. In regulated industries like healthcare or financial services, the stakes are even higher. Compliance with emerging frameworks on trust, privacy, and algorithmic transparency isn’t optional; it’s non-negotiable.

And yes, this is a two-way street. You also don’t want to fall prey to agent-to-agent fraud.

👉 Infrastructure: be ready to match agentic speeds and volumes
Speed and efficiency are increasingly the name of the game. Machine customers will expect you to make their purchasing life easy with low-latency responses, machine-readable formats and ‘Done-for-them’ analytics (e.g. calculating total cost of ownership).

This requires a digital infrastructure that goes beyond presenting a pretty website for human customers—it must also offer an efficient interface for machines. Today and tomorrow.

Ask yourself: Is my digital (and legal) roadmap up to date? When customer bots come knocking, are we ready to open the door?

Then, move to the second level: recalibrating the experience.

2. Recalibrate the experience

While building your foundations, it’s also important to rethink the customer experience itself.

Let’s face it—all our past CX efforts have focused on humans. Machines, however, are entirely different. They:

• Don’t care about the quality of your coffee or your staff’s personality.
• Aren’t swayed by emotional arguments that justify your premium price.
• Ignore your environmental statements and judge you solely by the data.
• Are annoyingly rational, so unless instructed otherwise by their humans, simply ignore that image video on your website.

This shift means humans will have even fewer reasons to interact with your brand or business. Why would they visit your website, read your documentation, or speak to your salespeople when their bots can do the heavy lifting? Especially for awkward stuff like talking to a contact centre, understanding your product, or negotiating a price.

But if your customers don’t show up for these interactions, how will you convey the aspects that make your proposition or business unique, which cannot be captured as data?

The good news is that both the technology and trust in machines still need to develop, so there’s some time to prepare. But once agents work as advertised and show how to secure better, faster, and cheaper deals, they will spread quickly. This will be especially true in B2B, where stakes are higher, time is tighter, and CEOs know that more rational purchases can shave a few cost percentages.

To prepare for this reality, you need to blend the agent experience and human experience into something entirely new.

👉 Design an Agent Experience (AX−Yes I just wrote that)
When customers instruct their agents, they won’t be thinking about your business. They’ll be thinking about their lives, and the bots’ priorities will reflect that complexity.

For example:

• A grocery bot might coordinate with a meal-planning bot, a health bot, and a CO2 tracker. Together, they recommend their user how much pizza is on the menu and which brand to buy.
• A logistics provider’s RFP bot could look at all the obvious data, like carbon emissions, price, and customer satisfaction. Yet, it could also include in its decision-making weather patterns affecting delivery routes, historical strike activity, or an analysis of vendor diversity practices.

To avoid being surprised, you need to figure out how customers will use AI agents before they do. This means:

1. Adopting a life-centric perspective, considering your customer’s needs beyond your business’s narrow lens. What rational, emotional, aspirational, and even spiritual needs will these bots help customers meet?
2. Hypothesise the algorithms, data, APIs, trust indicators, and other features these custobots will look for.
3. Align your data proactively with their decision-making logic bots in your favour. Yes, nudging and experiences for bots have arrived.

👉Upgrade your Human Experience
Even with bots in the picture, humans still pay the bills and influence the parameters bots use to search, select, negotiate, and buy. To ensure this benefits your business, you need emotional connection. You need to feel right to the human in the background. Be memorable. Especially in B2B.

This means thinking beyond better, faster, cheaper or the other parameters bots will already evaluate.

Instead, you should:

• Focus on key moments: Trying to control every aspect of the customer relationship is impossible. It spreads your resources too thin. Instead, ensure nothing goes wrong on all transactional elements and double down on two or three high-touch moments that are so memorable they keep you at the top of the customer’s mind. ​

• Prioritise human connection: To keep winning in tomorrow’s human experience game, you’ll need to dig deeper than being easy and effortless. You need to act on your customer’s deepest needs, aspirations and ambitions.

When the customer’s AIs decide your offer is merely on par with the competition, it’s the business with the best human experience that wins.

Ask yourself: Do my customer relationship and experience efforts consider machine customers? Are we ready to deliver an agent and human experience for the new reality?

Then, think about becoming a leader in the machine customer market.

3. Take leadership

While radical transparency and new margin pressures loom, there is still time to get ready. Agentic AI is still being invented, and adoption will take time.

This gives you the chance to be a first—or early—over and helps customers jump into the new reality. It’s a proven strategy that works every time a technology reshapes the market.

Back in the 1960s, American Airlines revolutionised their industry by introducing SABRE, a computerised booking system for airlines. By recognising the market changes ahead and moving first, they could align their internal systems before any competitor, and ensure their airline code, AA, always appeared at the today. More recently, Apple’s App Store, or Amazon AWS, played the same trick, and secured a dominant position through early leadership.

Taking leadership means being the one to start the conversation and start the change with your customers, your employees, and your industry. Today, as agents go live, as well as tomorrow, when they evolve.

👉 Start the conversation with your customers
For the next few years, Forrester, Gartner, McKinsey, and countless software vendors will bombard your customers with the benefits of Agentic AI. Yet while they will talk about industry-level developments at best, YOU can sit down with YOUR customers and discuss how Agentic AI can benefit THEIR business.

How will it save them time? Help negotiate the best rates? Improve operational efficiency? By initiating these conversations, you:
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• Show proactive concern for their priorities.
• Help shape their perception of the technology.
• Make it harder for competitors to do the same.

Also, by being the first to speak, you’ll learn more about the criteria and algorithms their bots will use—allowing you to align your business just a little better.

👉 Prepare your employees
If you’re reading this article, you’re likely ahead of the curve. But most people have no idea how Agentic AI could reshape—or even threaten—their roles.

Still, in the coming years, your contact centre, commercial, and technical teams will start receiving emails and calls from bots. Their responses will need to be coordinated across teams, consistent with information and data that can be found elsewhere and algorithmically empathetic. Which is newspeak for knowing how to interact with computers, yet retain enough human sense to know what is right for the human customer in the background.

Meanwhile, your senior leaders need to come to terms with additional margin pressure, radical transparency, the dual strategy of being computer efficient while increasing human experience. Not to mention that many of the rules they learned about management are crumbling.

By engaging your people now, you’ll build confidence and competence for the road ahead.

👉 Encourage industry transformation
While you should pursue any tactical benefits you can gain from better data, infrastructure, and AI tools, remember: the changes driven by Agentic AI will affect entire ecosystems.

Any bot you may suggest to or build for your customers must be able to work with all of their vendors. It must also comply with both generic and sector-specific regulations. To be trusted, it will require independent verification, trust mechanisms, clear documentation, and the likes.

This makes interoperability and cross-industry collaboration essential. Think Swift, Visa, 5G Consortium. Only now for margarine or plumbing equipment. So get ready to connect with competitors and ecosystem partners in industry consortia to co-create standards. By aligning your business with these efforts, you’ll be able to shape the direction of your ecosystem.

Because if you don’t take the lead, Google, Amazon or Alibaba will. Making you a tech vassal, rather than a driver of your industry.

Ask yourself: Are we taking a wait-and-see approach to machine customers, or are we getting ready for the shift? How will we position ourselves as customers, bots and tech giants change the rules?
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Conclusion

Gartner estimates that by 2030, 15–20% of revenue will come from machine customers. While we can debate the timing and the shape of their curve, one thing is clear: machine customers are an inevitable part of both B2B and B2C markets. And they will change how we approach customer experiences and relationships.

There’s still time to get ready.
Change is always slower than pundits predict. Yet it is usually also more profound that most of us envisage.

So the smart leaders will get proactive about the machine customer reality by building solid foundations, recalibrating their experience, and taking leadership.

My recommendation for 2025
Start a machine customer task force. Assemble people from digital, customer service, marketing, and commercial teams to learn about machine customers and their impact on your business:

✅ Digitally.
✅ For your human experience.
✅ For your employees.

Meanwhile, inform your senior leadership about the risks and opportunities ahead, and act with the urgency of a startup. Because if you don’t move, one of your competitors, or Silicon Valley, will.

After 30 years of working on human customer relationships and experiences, I believe the game has fundamentally changed. While I admit the uncertainty is a little unsettling, it’s also exciting to be part of a once-in-a-century opportunity for true transformation.

I’m up for it. How about you? Ready to play?
What do you think? Are you getting ready for the age of AI powered customers? Does the logic in this article resonate? As I mentioned, it’s a first prototype, so I’d love to hear your thoughts, ideas or even challenges. We’re all figuring out how to progress.
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Onwards and upwards! 🚀
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Sources

• https://www.forrester.com/blogs/the-future-of-b2b-buying-will-come-slowly-and-then-all-at-once/
• https://www.businessoffashion.com/articles/technology/the-state-of-fashion-2025-report-generative-ai-artificial-intelligence-search-discovery/
• https://www.gartner.com/en/newsroom/press-releases/2023-03-01-gartner-says-20-percent-of-inbound-customer-service-contact-volume-will-come-from-machine-customers-by-2026
• https://www.sellerscommerce.com/blog/ai-agents-statistics/

Transparency note
AI didn’t write this article, I did. However, in the spirit of transparency, I have used:

• Perplexity for research
• ChatGPT as a developmental editing partner
• ProWritingAid for grammar and syntax refinement
• Midjourney for images

All insights, arguments, and perspectives are entirely my own.