Machine customers are already making decisions, purchases, and demands — are you building for them, or being bypassed by them?
The rise of the custobot
For centuries, commerce has operated on a simple assumption: your customer is a person.
But what happens when your customer isn’t human — doesn’t sleep, doesn’t get distracted, doesn’t care about your brand — and can out-analyze your entire sales team in milliseconds?
Welcome to the world of machine customers.
Defined by Don Scheibenreif and Mark Raskino in their book When Machines Become Customers, these non-human economic actors are intelligent agents — physical or digital — that transact on behalf of people, businesses, or even themselves.
They’re already here. HP printers reordering their own ink. Smart fridges choosing sustainable suppliers. Personal AI assistants negotiating insurance renewals. Adobe recently reported an 805% increase in AI-driven traffic to ecommerce sites during Black Friday.
These aren’t edge cases. They’re early signals of a trillion-dollar shift.
2030: the year of the machine buyer
Gartner predicts that by 2030, machine customers will directly influence or participate in $30 trillion worth of purchases.
“That figure breaks down as follows: $18.7 trillion will be transacted by autonomous machine customers, $7.5 trillion of purchases will be augmented by machine customers, and $6.0 trillion will be facilitated by machine customers,” says Don Scheibenreif.
Gartner also estimates, that by 2028, 15 billion connected products will exist with the potential to behave as customers, with billions more to follow in the coming years.
Unlike human customers, these machines won’t get tired, distracted, or persuaded by slogans. They’ll buy based on structured data, API response times, and supply chain integrity.
As Katja Forbes notes in her book Machine Customers: The Evolution Has Begun, designing for these customers means rethinking everything we know about customer experience (CX). Forget brand loyalty. Forget storytelling. Machine customers care about logic, latency, and verified truth.
When a custobot stops buying — it tells every other custobot
Katja Forbes was a keynote speaker at a recent CX Master Class, where she shared a compelling example of how machine customers operate in the real world: A shopper’s AI assistant — Tyler — switched supermarkets not once, but twice. The final trigger? It discovered that a product labeled as organic had lost its certification, but the retailer hadn’t updated the information. Tyler didn’t just remove the item — it blacklisted the entire store and shared that information across its network of AI agents.
This isn’t a cautionary tale. It’s a reality.
When customers can independently verify claims and instantly share violations across networks, brand trust isn’t won with advertising — it’s earned through data accuracy and operational transparency.
The custobot doesn’t care about your brand
It cares about your data.
If your site can’t be read by machines, if your APIs are closed, or your product metadata is incomplete — you’re invisible. Literally.
According to a Gartner forecast cited by Mecalux, 20% of websites will be obsolete for human use, redesigned instead for machine consumption.
These AI buyers will:
- Pull real-time pricing, ethics, and ESG data from structured feeds
- Bypass marketing pages that lack semantic clarity
- Complete zero-click purchases inside tools like ChatGPT, Gemini, or Alexa — without ever visiting your website.
The buyer has already left the building. And they didn’t even use the front door.
Preparing for a non-human buyer
Whether you’re a retailer, software company, or B2B service provider, the custobot is coming. The good news? You can prepare.
Here are five actions every business must take now:
- Make your product data machine-readable.
Custobots analyze hundreds of variables. If your data’s incomplete, they’ll skip you. - Open your APIs.
If your services can’t integrate or respond in real time, you’re off the shortlist. - Eliminate bot-blockers where appropriate.
CAPTCHA might stop fraud — but it also blocks legitimate AI agents. - Redesign CX for machines.
As Katja Forbes outlines, machine customer experience (MCX) demands structured trust — clarity, reliability, and consistent signal quality. - Ensure machines can complete transactions.
From discovery to payment, the entire journey must be executable with no human intervention.
What this means for your marketing team
SEO isn’t dead. But search engine marketing (SEM) is shifting.
Machine customers don’t click ads. They don’t browse. They ask questions. And AI tools decide where to go based on quality of data — not bidding strategies.
This requires a new approach to your digital presence. As Katja Forbes puts it in her book:
I hear many asking the same question: ‘Will AI replace us?’ This is the wrong question. The right question is, ‘How do we use our expertise to lead the biggest transformation in customer experience since we invented the discipline?’
What next?
If you’re not planning for custobots, you’re not just behind — you’re invisible to your next best buyers.
The machine customers aren’t coming.
They’re already checking out.
Katja Forbes offers a simple, practical starting point. In the CXO Outlook November 2025 issue, she puts it like this: Let me give you the simplest action any organisation could take: gather all your website content, throw it into Claude or ChatGPT, and ask it to evaluate everything and generate a machine-readable JSON file that explains your value proposition. Put that at the root of your website. That’s easy to do, and suddenly your products are discoverable and understandable to machine customers.
No excuses, no complex roadmap. Just the first step toward being seen — and selected — by a different kind of buyer.
Want the full picture?
Download our latest quick guide, Machine customers are here — are you ready?, to explore how AI agents are already changing every stage of the customer journey — from discovery to loyalty. Packed with practical insights, it offers a clear, actionable guide for sales and marketing leaders preparing for a world where your next customer may be human, machine, or both. If you’re serious about staying visible — and viable — in the age of autonomous buyers, this is your essential field manual.
