The Rise of the Machines - Conceptualizing the Machine Economy.

Recently a novel phenomenon, the machine economy, experiences rapidly increasing recognition from both research and practice. However, we still lack a thorough conceptual understanding of its driving technologies and their interrelations. This hampers the incorporation of the machine economy in today’s organizations to unleash its full potential. Therefore, we set out with a conceptual research approach. First, we investigate the characteristics of the central technologies, the Internet of Things (IoT), Artificial Intelligence (AI), and Blockchain (BC). Second, we examine the bilateral technology interrelations to explicate their synergistic interplay. Third, we shed light on their trilateral technology convergence and conflate our reasoning into a holistic conceptual model. Finally, we demonstrate the machine economy’s real-world applicability with three exemplary instantiations. Throughout our research approach, we observe the machine economy concept through two theoretical lenses: the theory of selfadaptive systems and the actor-network theory.