The Rise of Machine Customers: Your Next Customer Won’t Be Human

Executive Snapshot

Your next customer may be software. Your offer may be evaluated first by machine customers, which reward clear, consistent, machine-readable value signals. Winning means designing with AX (Agent Experience) in mind, creating new sales and servicing channels, recognizing machine identity and having agent-ready products.

AI is the baseline. The next shift is autonomous business: agents participating in markets, machine identities negotiating and transacting, and programmable money reshaping value exchange.

This is not primarily a technology story. The bigger shift is adapting the business itself: decision flows, channels for machine customers, and products built for autonomous transactions.

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The market shift: the first review happens in code

Autonomous business changes who participates in economic activity. As AI agents gain the ability to search, compare, negotiate, and execute transactions, the counterparty in a deal may increasingly be a machine customer, or another agent, not a human.

That shift changes differentiation. The first “review” of a product, service, or proposal may happen in software. Competing successfully will increasingly mean proving value to an autonomous evaluator through transparent, consistent, machine-readable signals, not only to a human buyer.

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From UX to AX: Make your offer executable

Agent Experience (AX) becomes a new design imperative because the user of your digital presence is increasingly an agent, whether it’s looking for information, comparing options, buying, or making changes to an existing service.

— Jan Antoš, CTO Trask

AX is about making terms, pricing, policies, and service actions legible and executable for agents, not just pleasant in a human UX. Gartner frames machine customers as a new market and predicts that by 2028, AI agents will intermediate over $15T of B2B spend through AI agent exchanges. It also describes a three-stage evolution of machine customers:

1. Customer Advisor: agents that research and recommend
2. Proxy Customer: agents that are instructed to complete the business on behalf of a human
3. Autonomous Customer: flly autonomous agents that act based on their own intent and are only driven by a set of rules (or prompts)

As autonomy increases, new friction points grow in importance: identity, authorization, accountability, and auditability.

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The leadership test: Can you be found and authenticated?

The practical leadership question discussed at Trask Future Insight is: will you be discoverable to non-human customers, and are your digital channels ready to communicate with them, detect them, and authenticate them?

New digital channels will appear to support new types of customers. These channels will support various needs: AX-optimized websites for information gathering by machine customers, sales-oriented channels for agents that buy goods and services on their own and servicing-oriented channels where customers’s agents can automate service tasks for their masters.  

This is where machine identity becomes central and why “agent-ready” products matter. As machine customers will have different behaviour patterns compared to humans, companies must properly detect them, authenticate them and have a right set of security and anti-fraud rules set for them. Eventually a machine-ready  

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Executive action list: Be agent-ready

1. Treat AX as a channel. Assume agents are a primary “reader” of your digital presence.
2. Make your offer machine-readable. Terms, pricing, policies, sales, and service actions must be legible and executable for agents.
3. Ship agent-ready products. APIs plus machine-readable terms and SLAs, with auditable steps.
4. Support the machine identity of your customer’s agents. Detection and authentication, with controls for authorization, accountability, auditability, and new fraud rules.

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Get ready for machine customers by building agent-ready channels, redesigning product and services for machine consumption, and implementing machine identity. Let's Talk →