Engaged to a Robot? The Role of AI in Service

TLDR

AI has evolved from mechanical to thinking to feeling. The article develops a strategic framework for using AI to engage customers across various service benefits. The framework outlines how to deploy mechanical, thinking, and feeling AIs for customer engagement, considering service task nature, offering, strategy, and process, and recommends reducing lower‑level human involvement as AI advances, with illustrative applications and managerial guidance. At the current AI level, mechanical AI handles routine, transactional service for cost leadership; thinking AI manages data‑rich personalization for quality leadership; feeling AI drives relational high‑touch interactions for relationship leadership, with each AI type used at appropriate service stages.

Abstract

This article develops a strategic framework for using artificial intelligence (AI) to engage customers for different service benefits. This framework lays out guidelines of how to use different AIs to engage customers based on considerations of nature of service task, service offering, service strategy, and service process. AI develops from mechanical, to thinking, and to feeling. As AI advances to a higher intelligence level, more human service employees and human intelligence (HI) at the intelligence levels lower than that level should be used less. Thus, at the current level of AI development, mechanical service should be performed mostly by mechanical AI, thinking service by both thinking AI and HI, and feeling service mostly by HI. Mechanical AI should be used for standardization when service is routine and transactional, for cost leadership, and mostly at the service delivery stage. Thinking AI should be used for personalization when service is data-rich and utilitarian, for quality leadership, and mostly at the service creation stage. Feeling AI should be used for relationalization when service is relational and high touch, for relationship leadership, and mostly at the service interaction stage. We illustrate various AI applications for the three major AI benefits, providing managerial guidelines for service providers to leverage the advantages of AI as well as future research implications for service researchers to investigate AI in service from modeling, consumer, and policy perspectives.