You can't take a machine to lunch or put it to sleep with PowerPoint, but you can try to shape its worldview
A former marketer, Scheibenreif admitted that in his former life – like all marketers – he would create fear of missing out."We [marketers] use a really cool spokesperson, or we have something else that grabs your attention. But if I'm trying to sell that product to a machine, the machine doesn't care if Beyoncé is my spokesperson."
Scheibenreif said he's aware of an Italian vendor creating a digital marketplace for machines to shop at – so that industrial machinery that has been programmed to order commodity consumables such as lubricating oil could advertise its needs to the marketplace and then assess bids in a kind of entirely digital reverse auction.
Marketers fear this scenario, he said, because they will"need to figure out what the algorithm is to get into your shopping basket" – meaning how to convince the bot that one product is somehow more suited to your requirements than another."Because if I can't figure that out, and if [the] product is not differentiated enough, then it's going to be a race to the bottom on price.