Katja Forbes has spent 30 years in digital and design. She built, scaled and sold her own design consultancy, led design inside corporate, and now calls herself "a recovering design leader". She is the author of Machine Customers: The Evolution Has Begun, and she flew from Australia to Paris for this conversation.
Her argument: the next customer your product serves may not be a person. It might be a shopping agent, a procurement platform, a factory ordering its own parts, or a port that runs itself. And almost nothing we design today is built for it.
In this episode:
→ What a machine customer is, explained without jargon (after a couple of attempts)
→ Walking the whole customer journey when the customer is an AI agent: awareness, consideration, transaction, onboarding, servicing, off-boarding
→ "Readable to an AI agent, otherwise it's invisible"
→ AI negotiators already closing supplier contracts, and why B2B is moving faster than B2C
→ Why the Global South may leapfrog everyone, from M-Pesa to government agents
→ User research when the user is a model: she wants to interview your AI agent
→ "Fixed customer journeys, worthless." Generative UI and going headless
→ What founders should do in the next 12 months: get hands-on
→ Why telling designers their craft is obsolete is hurtful, and the kinder way to say it
Chapters
00:00 Trailer
00:30 Australia to Paris, and a "recovering design leader"
02:30 Why design leadership is heavier now
06:30 "What happens if the thing becomes the customer?"
10:00 Designing experiences for non-humans
13:30 What is a machine customer? A port with no humans
17:00 Tyler the shopping agent, and stablecoins in plain English
22:30 The machine customer journey, end to end
33:00 The book
34:30 AI that negotiates: Walmart, Maersk, procurement
38:30 Governments, M-Pesa and leapfrog markets
43:00 User research when the user is a model
45:00 "Fixed customer journeys, worthless"
47:00 Going headless: good news for older users?
49:00 What founders should do in the next 12 months
52:30 The one thing she's certain of
55:00 "Your talk made me decide to retire"
57:00 Where to find her
Guest: Katja Forbes — The CX Evolutionist. Author, Machine Customers: The Evolution Has Begun.
thecxevolutionist.ai
LinkedIn: Katja Forbes
Substack: Field Notes from the Agentic Economy
Host: Guidione Machava, founder of World Class Design.
world-class.design
