AI endings? Surprisingly, maybe.
AI is everywhere. Being sold as the greatest human achievement. How might it do at endings and the complexities of off-boarding?
This week Sundar Pichai, CEO of Alphabet and Google, presented the latest updates to Google’s Gemini AI. 1Within the celebratory examples of its achievements was a scenario of returning some recently purchased sneakers to a store. Sundar announced, “Its pretty fun to shop for shoes. And a lot less fun to return them.” There it was, the consumer lifecycle summarised in a witty AI sales pitch.
He continued to describe the how the Gemini AI could do all these task for you – “searching your inbox for the receipt. Getting the order number from email. Filling out a return slip. And scheduling the pickup. That’s much easier, right?”
Some might argue this is part of the purchase-choosing experience. I agree, but the mechanisms as an experience are also ones of removal, rejection, and return. Identical to other ending experiences later after product usage.
What I would like to have seen is AI apply its enormous capability to the gritty, dirty problem of what to do with shoes after use. Long after the consumer has lost the receipts, or even changed email providers. Maybe they have moved states or countries. The Gemini simplistic view of the end creates a convenient fiction of automated returns, but often the end of the product experience is messy. It’s outside the digital tentacles of mass surveillance shopping online and automated logistics.
Off-boarding a product at end of product life can present a wide range of experiences, from the local bureaucratic laws of waste processing, to the technical fears of data privacy, to the emotional concerns of sentimental loss. We discussed some of the experiences on a recent Endineering course2. A student bought up the feelings of guilt or burden that might come from handing items on to a second hand store. If for example giving the store something like an old toaster, which could have many issues around reselling, to the ease of reselling a mildly worn pair of jeans. Many people have the impression that a second hand shop can take anything. But it isn’t always true. I wrote a recent article about the burden of books for example. 3An item which I would assume is ideal - it is not electronic, from a famous author, robust life span (doesn’t ware out).
AI could have the potential to help navigate off-boarding experiences at the end of product life and not just returns. Although the digital footprint would be almost non-existent for these items. It might have the potential to know inventory of big second hand stores, or at least know what is unwanted. It might be able to help in guiding a person around local waste legislation, before a they go to the dump with something valuable. It might also be able to recommend alternatives, such as selling on eBay or dismantling and planting in your garden.
Off-boarding is a really complex space, where we need real innovation. Fingers crossed this user case might be a difficult enough problem for AI to be interested in.
1 https://blog.google/inside-google/message-ceo/google-io-2024-keynote-sundar-pichai/
2 https://learn.endineering.co/
3 https://www.andend.co/blog/2023/10/26/over-consumption-to-over-donation
