Today, when you sign up for a demo or free trial of a software product, you are usually put on an email drip campaign. Every few days, you will receive an email that the product owner believes will help you understand the product better and hopefully buy. But what happens when your software is an A.I.? Will you need a drip campaign?
Think about the way you buy a phone, or an appliance. You do some research online, you look for reviews, you go to the store and talk to a salesperson. But as appliances are smart, or, as robots become a major purchase, how will we buy them? The interesting thing about the intelligence revolution is that, as intelligence gets built into everything, those everythings can sell themselves to us. The question is, will they? I'll take a quick look at both the "yes" and "no" arguments for the issue.
Yes. Machines Will Sell Us On Them - Most people don't like being sold to, and that is part of what makes sales so challenging. As we start to buy products that have a brain, it will feel less sales-y to talk to these smart products. By asking them questions about themselves, and allowing them to ask us questions, we will feel like we are building a relationship, not getting sold. Products that educate us about their benefits will make us feel more comfortable, and the products themselves will probably learn what to say to make sure we feel good about our purchase. So yes, intelligent systems will do their own selling.
No. Machines Won't Sell Themselves - Labor is currently the only thing we buy that has the capability to sell itself - human labor that is. And how do we approach that? There are really two markets - human service providers selling their services to us, and job candidates selling themselves to employers. In both cases, my personal observation is that the sales aspects of those relationships are more muted than the sales aspects of inanimate objects. People, when selling themselves, try to come off softer, less cheesy, and less like they are selling. So, as machine intelligences approach and surpass humans in capabilities, we will see them more like humans, and expect them not to sell us on them too hard.
I don't know which path is more likely to happen, but we are in the early stages of A.I.s that can talk to their owners, and I expect to see a lot of marketing and sales experimentation within companies building those A.I.s. Or maybe in the end, someone builds a negotiating A.I. that we can all buy and just avoid the sales process altogether.
If you like this post, and are interested in machine intelligence, sign up for my newsletter and get a curated list of links and papers.