Seize the moment.

If Chris Slater knew that his company Experian was preparing a $485 million bid for the US-based price comparison website PriceGrabber.com when he spoke at the Information Age Business Intelligence conference in November, he did not give any indication of this.

But the director of information resources for the business information company certainly gave a strong clue to the way senior managers at Experian are thinking. Slater forecasts that the most successful companies in the future will be those that are able to 'seize the moment' and personalise their offerings to consumers - in real time.

And that particular moment, he stresses, will almost certainly be on the customer's terms - a complicating factor that requires responsive businesses to have event-driven, real-time responses prepared in advance.

This new 'paradigm' has been called the C2B revolution - consumer-to-business - and involves the customer willingly providing their information to a business in order to elicit a response, rather than a business broadcasting its services and waiting for the customer to show up.

That sets part of the agenda for the future; today the broad challenge that retailers present to Experian is how to get noticed and how to fully exploit commercial opportunities as they arise. And the use of business intelligence (BI) against vast datasets plays an essential role.

Slater illustrates the challenge of getting noticed with two examples. In the futuristic film Minority Report, the lead actor Tom Cruise is repeatedly recognised and bombarded with personalised, real-time, electronic advertising messages as he attempts to work his way anonymously through a shopping mall.

Cameras and scanners recognise and respond to him at every turn. This may be fiction, but only just: technology such as location-based services, CCTV and RFID chips make this scenario plausible.