Consumers and Artificial Intelligence: An Experiential Perspective

Stefano Puntoni, R Walker Reczek, M Giesler, S Botti

Research output: Contribution to journalArticleAcademicpeer-review

477 Citations (Scopus)
3768 Downloads (Pure)

Abstract

Artificial intelligence (AI) helps companies offer important benefits to consumers, such as health monitoring with wearable devices, advice with recommender systems, peace of mind with smart household products, and convenience with voice-activated virtual assistants. However, although AI can be seen as a neutral tool to be evaluated on efficiency and accuracy, this approach does not consider the social and individual challenges that can occur when AI is deployed. This research aims to bridge these two perspectives: on one side, the authors acknowledge the value that embedding AI technology into products and services can provide to consumers. On the other side, the authors build on and integrate sociological and psychological scholarship to examine some of the costs consumers experience in their interactions with AI. In doing so, the authors identify four types of consumer experiences with AI: (1) data capture, (2) classification, (3) delegation, and (4) social. This approach allows the authors to discuss policy and managerial avenues to address the ways in which consumers may fail to experience value in organizations’ investments into AI and to lay out an agenda for future research.

Original languageEnglish
Pages (from-to)131-151
Number of pages21
JournalJournal of Marketing
Volume85
Issue number1
DOIs
Publication statusPublished - Jan 2021

Bibliographical note

Funding Information:
The authors thank Carl Mela and the Marketing Science Institute for organizing the 2018 MSI Scholars conference that provided the opportunity to work together on this project, Christine Moorman and John Deighton for their guidance, participants at the Marketing Science conference in Rome for their feedback, and Gizem Yalcin for her help and feedback. The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Publisher Copyright:
© American Marketing Association 2020.

Research programs

  • RSM MKT

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