What if your next customer didn't have a pulse, preferences, or patience for poor performance?
In Machine Customers: The Evolution Has Begun, CX Evolutionist, Katja Forbes, reveals how intelligent agents, autonomous procurement systems, and logic-driven buying platforms are silently revolutionising commerce. This trillion-dollar transformation is happening now, not in some distant future.
Visa and Mastercard's AI agents are shopping for customers. Walmart's AI procurement makes million-dollar purchasing decisions in seconds without human intervention. Consumer advocate agents negotiate you out of your gym contracts. ChatGPT Agent will plan and book your holidays. These machine customers don't respond to emotional appeals or brand storytelling. They evaluate clear information, consistent performance, and verifiable claims faster than any human ever could.
Every business leader should be asking the same question: "How do we stay competitive when our customers are machines?" Forbes provides the answer. Drawing on exclusive interviews with Don Scheibenreif (Gartner's leading machine customer authority) and Bruce Temkin (creator of industry-standard CX metrics), plus experts from Salesforce, Qualtrics, and other industry leaders, this book reveals the strategic playbook early adopters are using to build competitive advantages.
The book transforms abstract concepts into Monday-morning implementation through original frameworks: the Machine Customer Experience Strategy Map, five Machine Customer types, and step-by-step guidance for redesigning customer journeys that win both human hearts and machine logic. There are 30-60-90-day plans for leaders and advice on how to set up a machine-customer experience operating system in their organisation.
Forbes shows leaders exactly how to make their businesses discoverable to AI agents, design machine-readable value propositions, navigate machine trust and ethics and build algorithmic loyalty systems that lock out competitors. More importantly, she reveals how to excel in the hybrid reality where businesses must serve both emotional humans and logical machines simultaneously.
The businesses that understand this evolution first will dominate their industries. Those that don't will become irrelevant. Forbes ensures readers will be in the first category.
Industry Reviews
'A wake-up call for leaders. This book forces us to look beyond the human-only lens of customer experience and prepare for a hybrid world of people, bots, and autonomous decision-makers.'
Jay Dutta, Global Head of User Experience, Deutsche Bank and Founder, DesignUp Conference - Bengaluru, India
'I absolutely love this work from Katja Forbes. She explores a key dimension of CX: What does CX look like for a Machine Customer? Since AI agents don't have emotions, the building blocks of experience will be very different. This means your approach to CX will be very different.'
Don Scheibenreif, author of When Machines Become Customers and Distinguished VP Analyst at Gartner - Mission Viejo, California, US
'Katja is one of the freshest, sharpest minds in the CX space.'
Paula Kennedy Garcia, Chief Client Officer, UK and Ireland and Managing Director, Ireland, Capita - London, UK
'A completely novel insight into the new world we are just entering ... a world where we already anticipate humans and AI-controlled machines, but Forbes takes us to a new and surprising place: the world where intelligent machines collaborate to build a new kind of economy.'
Peter Schwartz, Chief Futurist, Salesforce - San Francisco, US
