Examining artificial intelligence (AI) technologies in marketing via a global lens: Current trends and future research opportunities

TLDR

AI has attracted significant attention from marketing scholars in recent years. This study examines AI technologies in marketing through a global lens and formulates research questions on their interaction across country, company, and consumer levels. The authors analyze AI at country, company, and consumer levels—considering economic inequality, glocalization, and consumer ethics/privacy—and investigate human–machine interaction and automated analysis of text, audio, images, and video.

Abstract

Artificial intelligence (AI) has captured substantial interest from a wide array of marketing scholars in recent years. Our research contributes to this emerging domain by examining AI technologies in marketing via a global lens. Specifically, our lens focuses on three levels of analysis: country, company, and consumer. Our country-level analysis emphasizes the heterogeneity in economic inequality across countries due to the considerable economic resources necessary for AI adoption. Our company-level analysis focuses on glocalization because while the hardware that underlies these technologies may be global in nature, their application necessitates adaptation to local cultures. Our consumer-level analysis examines consumer ethics and privacy concerns, as AI technologies often collect, store and process a cornucopia of personal data across our globe. Through the prism of these three lenses, we focus on two important dimensions of AI technologies in marketing: (1) human–machine interaction and (2) automated analysis of text, audio, images, and video. We then explore the interaction between these two key dimensions of AI across our three-part global lens to develop a set of research questions for future marketing scholarship in this increasingly important domain.