The Autonomous Economy Is Here. Can We Make It Feel More Human?

A funny thing happened to me on the way to the Augmented World Expo or AWE. AWE started as one of the flagship events where pioneers of both Virtual and Augmented reality technologies gather under what’s now an umbrella term for these fields called XR. What’s still up for debate is where the Metaverse falls under the XR umbrella, or does it sit over it? Right now all things Metaverse are up for debate but as far as AWE 2022 goes—the Metaverse was a key theme.

After exploring some of the booths at AWE, and prepping for my talk I realized that I needed some quick sustenance and didn’t have time to go offsite. I found an area that had three fully autonomous vending machines with, believe it or not, pretty appetizing options. One had an assortment of hot noodles while another offered all kinds of warm goodies from soft pretzels to croissants and more, and yet a third offered a variety of healthy-looking smoothies.

Tight on time, I used my phone to pay for a hot pretzel and a green smoothie. Then the magic happened. Both vending machines talked to me, reassuring me that my order was being processed and all kinds of noises from the machines including visual status updates of the pretzel being warmed up—the only thing missing was the small talk, but more on that later. In less than five minutes, my warm pretzel popped out and my fresh smoothie was being poured into a cup. And here’s the thing—as far as vendor food goes it was decent—pretty good actually. The smoothie especially. If I could have left a tip for my autonomous smoothie maker, I might have.

Signs The Autonomous Economy Is Accelerating

Interestingly enough, just last week autonomous driving company Cruise (a GM venture) announced that it is the first company in its’ category to secure a permit in the city of San Francisco to charge riders for automated “robo-taxi” service. So we’re one step closer to driverless ridesharing, and automated deliveries. Will we miss that small talk with our rideshare drivers? What will happen to gig economy workers? This transformation is going to take years and decades, but it’s well underway. And it’s also going to create new different jobs that will replace some but not all of the old ones. It’s not a bad idea right now to get into a career track that either equips you to design, engineer or even maintain autonomous systems and machines (they aren’t going to maintain themselves—some things will always require human intervention).

Making The Autonomous Experience More Empathetic

In my talk at AWE, I referenced the good, bad and ugly when it comes to the autonomous customer experience. We’re all familiar with legacy automated phone menus that drive us crazy—this is the ugly, but on the other side of the autonomous spectrum, experiences like the state-of-the-art Amazon AMZN Fresh stores remove the least enjoyable part of the customer experience—checking out. Amazon simply tracks what’s in your cart and you pay for it without even knowing you did. This is forward-looking automation replacing status quo automation, i.e. the automated scanners at stores that require humans to ensure they worked correctly.

But can these experiences feel more empathetic—more human? I think they can and will. My talk at AWE focused on something called “Empathetic Customer Experience” or ECX which aspires to bring more human empathy to all customer experiences, especially the ones they may need most in the not-so-distant future—the autonomous customer experience. So what this looks like in practice to go back to my autonomous vending machine example… instead of the machine simply giving me a display of when my pretzel is done, it could and should talk to me by name. It could also ask me if I would like restaurant recommendations in the area (something I actually would have said yes to) and the robotic voice and standard interface all could and should feel more human. Why wouldn’t it?

Linda Ricci, owner of digital consultancy Decahedralist is immersed in the blended world of augmented and virtual reality, now known as “XR”. At AWE, she gave a talk partially dedicated to the role autonomous digital humans will have in spaces and environments such as the Metaverse and especially in the less hyped category of customer service. Her analysis is that it is early days, but the potential is there and real.

The Autonomous Customer Experience Is Inevitable But Needs More Humanity

As the autonomous economy continues to grow so will the expectations we come to have from machines. There’s only so long that we’ll endure experiences that fall flat, don’t meet expectations, or don’t meet us where we are at. Whether that’s in the real world, one of our many screens, or maybe a metaverse of our choosing—we’re going to increasingly encounter avatars without humans controlling them, kiosks that serve us, and digital services that increasingly know more about us based on data and preferences. The question is, will these experiences become only artificially intelligent or emotionally intelligent as well. I think both are ultimately inevitable.