We talk a lot about understanding where the customer is in their user journey. What other in-the-moment user insights might we leverage?

Google Now, the natural language based personal assistant connects with over 100 external apps, services, etc. to develop an extremely in-the-moment understanding of what you are doing at any given time. Google Now has integration points for pushing real-time customer information to Google. We should start thinking about what happens when that level of intelligence makes its way to marketers.

Imagine being able to tailor your customer experience based on awareness of:

Their schedule: Are they between two appointments, or do they have an open calendar?
Where they are: There are over 100 million places and over 1 billion entities in Google's knowledge graph.
What their mood is: Think wearable sensors

Another player in this emerging market is Belgium based Sentiance. They use sensor data from phones, wearables and what will end up being a growing list of devices, combined with learning algorithms to deliver real-time insights that can be used to drive a new level of contextualized engagement with the customer.

You can also look at Bebaio, a Boston based start-up that is in pre-release of a customer engagement platform that's specifically designed for the Internet of Things (IoT). We expect to see integration points into customer experience platforms.

This space is still pretty much mobile only right now and it's on the extreme side of early adoption... But, it's not going to stay that way for long. As the pace of change in the digital space continues to increase, we're seeing a shorter and shorter window between science fiction like emerging technology and mainstream use.

The organizations best positioned to take advantage of sensor data within the customer experience are the ones that have already made solid progress on understanding who their customer is -- segmentation, persona development, customer journey stages, etc. Those organizations will have a better frame of reference to consider and explore how they may use sensor data originated intelligence within their customer experience.