Dries Buytaert

The Industrial Revolution, started in the middle of the 18th century, transformed the world. It marks the start of a major turning point in history that would influence almost every aspect of daily life. The Industrial Revolution meant the shift from handmade to machine-made products and increased productivity and capacity. Technological change also enabled the growth of capitalism. Factory owners and others who controlled the means of production rapidly became very rich and working conditions in the factories were often less than satisfactory. It wasn't until the 20th century, 150 years after its beginning, that the Industrial Revolution ended creating a much higher standard of living than had ever been known in the pre-industrial world. Consumers benefited from falling prices for clothing and household goods. The impact on natural resources, public health, energy, medicine, housing and sanitation meant that chronic hunger, famines and malnutrition started to disappear and the life expectancy started to increase dramatically.

An undesired side-effect of the Industrial Revolution is that instead of utilizing artisans to produce hand-made items, machines started to take the place of the artisans. Before the industrial revolution, custom-made goods and services were the norm. The one-on-one relationships that guilds had with their customers sadly got lost in an era of mass-production. But what is exciting me about the world today is that we're on the verge of being able to bring back one-on-one relationships with our customers, while maintaining increased productivity and capacity.

As the Big Reverse of the Web plays out and information and services are starting to come to us, we'll see the rise of a new trend I call "B2One". We're starting to hear a lot of buzz around personalization, as evidenced by companies like The New York Times making delivery of personalized content a core part of their business strategy. Another recent example is Facebook testing shopping concepts, letting users browse a personal feed of clothing and other items based on their "likes". I'd imagine these types of feeds could get smarter and smarter, refining themselves over time as a user browses or buys. Or just yesterday, Facebook launched Notify, an iOS app that pushes you personalized notifications from up to 70 sites.

These recent examples are early signs of how we're evolving from B2C to B2One (or from B2B2C to B2B2One), a world where all companies have a one-on-one relationship with their customers and personalized experiences will become the norm. Advances in technology allow us to get back what we lost hundreds of years ago in the Industrial Revolution, which in turn enables the world to innovate on business models. The B2One paradigm will be a very dramatic shift that disrupts existing business models (advertising, search engines, online and offline retailers) and every single industry.

For example, an athletic apparel company such as Nike could work sensor technology into its shoes, telling you once you've run a certain number of miles and worn them out. Nike would have enough of a one-on-one relationship with you to push an alert to your smartphone or smartwatch with a "buy" button for new shoes, before you even knew you needed them. This interaction is a win-win for both you and Nike; you don't need to re-enter your sizing and information into a website, and Nike gets a sale directly from you disrupting both the traditional and online retail supply chain (basically, this is bad news for intermediaries like Amazon, Zappos, clothing malls, Google, etc).

I believe strongly in the need for data-driven personalization to create smarter, pro-active digital experiences that bring back one-on-one relationships between producers and consumers. We have to dramatically improve delivering these personal one-on-one interactions. It means we have to get better at understanding the user's journey, the user's context, matching the right information/service to the user and making technology disappear in the background.