When a machine is the customer – designing for machines

In Texas, a child asks an Amazon Echo to "play dollhouse with me and get me a dollhouse?" In England, the words "OK Google, what is the Whopper burger?" in a Burger King advertisement trigger Google Home smart speakers to start spouting descriptions of the burgers. And sometime soon, your car may choose the best price for maintenance or an electric charge, as well as driving itself to the appointment. Welcome to the new world where intelligent machines, rather than people, make more and more decisions about what to buy, at what price, and complete the transactions without a middleman over a blockchain distributed ledger. This will mean massive new markets for everything from home supplies ordered via "smart speakers" such as Amazon Echo to electricity ordered by smart thermostats to replacement parts and raw materials purchased by manufacturing robots or optimisation algorithms for cyber physical systems of machines.