Should Your Brand Create a New Persona for the "Machine Customer"?

What are “machine customers”?

We can define machine customers as anything from a connected device, to a bot, to a GPT, and more. And, many of these machines are already among us, doing everything from negotiating with suppliers (Walmart) to ordering new car parts proactively (Tesla).

What’s the implication for brands?

Does every marketing team now need a persona and personalization strategy for this invasive species of machine customers?

The short answer is: no, not really. We see a better way to think about machines.

Take the Tesla and Walmart examples above. These AI machines were trained to do specific tasks under specific contexts, and within controlled ecosystems. Other AIs, while an improvement over algorithms, are similarly neither autonomous nor widely adaptable. They’re still just automating or assisting the work that humans are doing – and even if they could technologically make autonomous actions and decisions on our behalf, we’re not at the point where B2B customers want them to do that. 

Therefore, it's better for brands to think about "AI-influence" not as a new segment of customer, but as a layer of all customers’ digital buying journeys, and respond in kind. 

How to win over AI-influenced users

The good news is, there’s no new playbook needed for this new trend. Brands in digital have already been responding to AI-influenced users for years. For instance, Google Search has increasingly used AI over the years to better crawl and surface relevant content, and brands have iteratively built SEO strategies around those algorithms. Now with Google Gemini and other new AI influences, it’s really just another iterative improvement on these functionalities. With these improvements comes new optimization tactics for brands to respond with, but they don't need to throw out their SEO playbooks and start over – just continue evolving as they always have. 

Here’s a few examples of what you should be focusing on: 

• make sure that APIs on your site are easy for bots to interact with
• ensure quantitative information is exposed, structured, and easily crawlable
• continue to keep content keywords aligned with likely search intent
• audit for missing schema markup and meta data in digital content

This is the advice we’d give most brands on this specific topic. Of course, there are certain industries and situations where AI influence holds many other implications, threats, and opportunities. Recently, Genuine helped a cybersecurity client expose more B2B product information on their site, making the content more structured and accessible for bots and human users alike to compare tiers within products, as well as compare products against the competition. We’ve also developed a robust, full-day AI-in-Marketing workshop appropriate for marketing teams of any size, that brings everyone together to practically discuss and plan how to tackle these new horizons. Let us know if you are interested in this!

And if you DO think machines will take over the customer journey someday, we’ve also recently developed a light “machine customer” persona that covers a good amount of best practices for how these "users" tend to behave, and how your brand can design with them in mind, too.