Adaptive & Abstracted Choreography: 

Towards a Channel-less World

The term “omnichannel” has been around since the early 2010s, but it only became pervasive circa 2015-2016 when businesses shifted towards utilizing multiple channels to interact with their customer such as online shopping powered by mobile research with a transaction closed at a brick-and-mortar store. This shift in thinking prompted businesses to focus on the creation of seamless and consistent experiences across all channels, hence “omnichannel.” In other words, it is a customer-centric approach that eliminates traditional silos that exist between different marketing channels. In 2023, omnichannel is perceived by many as the de facto approach for engaging with customers. 

    In terms of evolutionary stages, consider the following progression: touchpoints (for messaging consistency and coordination) to omnichannel personalization (highly targeted and relevant messaging) to self-directed (personalization, prediction, and automation), ultimately proffering the right message, content, channel, offer, or resolution based on the entirety of the user’s preferences. From there, the natural evolution of omnichannel moves towards a “channel-less” approach – one that treats the entire customer experience (CX) as an unbroken tapestry where touchpoints are irrelevant and experiential architecture transcends channel.

This is suitable for now, but thinking in this fashion is detrimental to establishing a new paradigm for understanding these concepts. Even channel-less thinking admits that channels are fundamental to understanding CX whereas the future-forward way of viewing unified periences does not. Essentially, this represents the distinction between so-called “out-of-the-box” thinking and conceptualizing that denies the existence of "the box” altogether.

Which brings us to Experience Orchestration – a concept that gets a great deal of attention from client partners. The idea of tying together disparate digital systems and managing interactions between them is attractive but necessitates the inclusion of a central orchestrator. Such an agent bears responsibility for defining order of operations – a process/workflow advocate who ensures that systems and services perform harmoniously together. This orchestrator has complete control over process execution and can adjust on an exception basis. Generally speaking, orchestrators mix human intervention with AI tooling.

    But this intentional introduction of a mediator is an antiquated approach. As the Fourth Industrial Revolution of artificial intelligence (AI) unfolds, reintroducing an intermediary begins to look questionable at best. Moreover, it is hard to reconcile with the desirability of abstraction. Abstraction is a concept in computer science and programming that refers to the process of simplifying complex systems or ideas by focusing on essential details and hiding unnecessary complexity (or complicatedness). Essential features must, therefore, be identified based on the current discussion or problem. Abstraction is important in computer science because it allows programmers to manage complexity, create reusable components, and create systems that are easier to understand and maintain.

The omnichannel approach is beginning to show its age and the concept of channel-less orchestration may run afoul of the same convergent thinking that characterizes unified experiences. Perhaps instead of “orchestration” we should consider “choreography” as a more desirable, nuanced term.

Choreography involves each system or service interacting with other systems or services directly, without a central orchestrator. Each system or service has a predefined set of rules or protocols that govern its interactions with other systems or services. These rules or protocols define how the system or service should behave when it receives a message or a signal from another system or service. Each system or service is responsible for managing its own behavior and coordinating with other systems or services. This decentralized approach allows each system or service to be more autonomous and flexible, as it can adjust its behavior based on the behavior of other systems or services. To expand upon the metaphor, consider that a choreographer works with dancers in advance of performance, but on-stage, each individual is responsible for faithful recreation of what the choreographer defined and intended. Similarly, platforms support multiple systems, but each singular system is responsible to the dictates of its programming and the success of the platform depends upon faithful performance by each system – not unlike how a choreographer actively monitors a performance but takes no active hand, relying instead on the skills and professionalism of the performers. Far from eliminating nuance and subtlety from the piece, the hands-off nature of the choreographer allows for the addition of individualistic modifications from the dancers. This relates to the flexibility underpinning such a framework. 

As such, choreography seems more relevant to the age of intelligence. Over the course of the next decade, system and experiential architects will be making AI-integration more central to the product roadmap. While integrated intelligence is still novel, it bears mention as a key differentiator. However, in the future, intelligence-powered products will be the norm and the common assumption will be that every new piece of technology integrates AI in some fashion.

 A central, contemporary business problem can be summarized as, “How do you orchestrate complexity in an increasingly channel-less world?” Perhaps we should be thinking about disrupting those central conceits.