ATM Honcho: Your Shopping Future Isn’t Human
Posted April 17, 2007 12:00 pm.
This article is more than 5 years old.
They’re long established in banks.
You’ve seen them in movie theatres.
And you may even be using them to do the work on your own in your local supermarket.
They’re ATM and scanners, those devices that requite only a PIN, a card or your willingness to bypass contact with another human being.
And if you believe the man behind one of the world’s biggest manufacturers of the gizmos, they’re going to become an even larger part of your life.
Bill Nuti, the CEO of NCR Corp., believes what he calls the “Internet generation” would prefer to interact more with machines than humans and he’s preparing to turn his already huge conglomerate in that direction.
Nuti predicts in the future you’ll get more and more of the services you take for granted out of ATM-like kiosks, with everything from movie tickets, renewing your license, buying TTC tokens, purchasing lottery tickets or getting a phone card coming out of the little slot where your money is dispensed right now.
He claims his company’s research shows consumers between the ages of 18 and 35 have come to prefer being waited on by a machine over a much more fallible human.
“The ATM is becoming more of a customer-experience portal,” he maintains. “This is the Internet generation. This is really a movement.”
Nuti sees a future where everything is even more computer driven and you’ll do the bulk of your transactions mechanically.
He envisions a trip to your supermarket involving you doing the scanning, your banking, your ordering, your bill paying and just about anything else that now involves multiple trips to multiple places.
His future may be more efficient, but it’s definitely not more human.
What does that mean for the people currently in those jobs? If you believe the NCR honcho, their futures are looking dim.
Still, the bank teller and the checkout clerk aren’t likely to completely disappear.
After all, when something inevitably goes wrong with the technology, you’ll need someone there to complain to.
And while machines can do a lot of things, listening to your gripes still isn’t one of them.
