The Long Tail is the marketing buzz of 2006. The book at the centre of that buzz has a title that says it all: The Long Tail: Why the Future of Business is Selling Less of More (Anderson, Random House, 2006). Inverse power laws are hardly new - but interesting every time you find them in a new place: both design and art show some nice examples; a colleague once pointed out to me that brush stroke direction in painters like Van Gogh follow the pattern, and from there I noticed that the same is true in colour distribution in many carefully designed objects. Pick up a crisp packet, or a web home page for a big corporate, for example, and notice the percentage of each colour - plot a rank abundance and you’ll often notice an inverse power distribution. The graph’s not new. What’s new is the idea that the tail is where the action’s at.

In any domain, the big players that have customer-facing activities struggle with this idea. IVRs, call-centre scripts, and high-street chain retail stock policies all point towards a focus on the big hump at the expense of the long tail. This is not, as some old style marketeers would have you believe, democratization of the customer experience, but rather, homogenization: how often does the IVR menu from your telecommunications provider or bank not have the option that describes your situation? How often does the retailer stock only shirts that are too short or too broad? The result is that the seasoned customer - like the seasoned form-filler in any bureaucracy - learns how to transform their needs into a pattern that is expected by the provider (you select the menu option that is most likely to get you connected to a human regardless; you settle for the baggy look in shirts).

What marketing has recently woken up to is that providing service that really matches what people want is likely to win custom big time. And there’s money in them thar hills. The problem is that business processes aren’t designed to handle the enormous variation that the approach necessitates, and most software isn’t designed to handle it either. This is the killer problem of mass customisation: taking what you do and tailoring it to each individual customer. Dealing with a mass market of millions is no longer a case of saying “Aha, you’re a size 16 - Have one of our millions of size 16 shirts” but rather a case of scaling up bespoke tailoring so that it can support millions of custom sizes.

Slivercasting is an interesting example of how the Long Tail is being appealed to, but there the selection is all at the publisher’s end. At a push, even podcasting can be seen as Long Tailish - but the customisation is, for each feed, an all-or-nothing affair. For true mass customisation the number of possibilities is infinite (measured on the reals, for example) or else at many orders of magnitude greater than the number of customers, and the customisation is a process of negotiation between customer and supplier. And the costs are comparable with other mass market offerings. As far as I know, there are no live Long Tail infrastructures that offer true mass customisation in this sense. Yet.

It seems to me that this is a long sought after killer app for multi-agent systems, MAS (that long search is interesting in itself - but a topic for another day). With individual agents looking after individual customers, what becomes hard is the population of those agents’ heads with appropriate beliefs, rules, intentions, and whatever else. With the process of acquiring those data under the control of the agent (according to the MAS credo), the goal becomes much closer. An agent gathers data from the customer, selects business rules from the supplier, infers social structures through interaction patterns, and aims to build a rounded picture of the customer (with respect to the service). The application of rules, selection criteria, decisions and so on is localised at the agent, where all and only the relevant data and algorithms are on hand. If you’re in the shirt-making business, the agent might not be able to cut the cloth, but it takes on responsibility for the customer’s interests (as far as they impinge on your shirt-making), in, for example, negotiating the logistics chain from source to destination. More straightforwardly, in a customer relationship management (CRM) system for a telecoms provider, the agent applies business rules to the customer they represent, tracking the customer as a whole (as it impinges on the telecoms service), tailoring, prioritising, extending the rules for the case at hand (imagine no longer getting junk mail advertising services you already have!).

But more than the examples that leap to mind, what really excites me about the marriage of MAS and mass customisation (what we might call MAS customisation) is that the design philosophy and goals of the two are in perfect harmony: every individual in the system is unique; every individual is valuable (not euphemistically, but literally in a monetizable way). It is this match in the approach that will really yield benefits as new, unanticipated problems in implementing MAS customisation crop up in the first few domains where it supports an obvious business plan. With the right design philosophy in place, the engineering problems can be tackled as individual, isolatable engineering problems - not soul-searching architecture revisions.

Dealing with mass customisation is going to be one of the key challenges in service delivery over the coming few years, and there are going to be many problems. But MAS customisation is a strong contender for building at least some of the pieces of the solution.