Artificial Intelligence and Robots in the Service Encounter

We believe that our economies are facing a turning point in history similar to the industrial revolution in manufacturing that started in the 18th century. Rapidly improving technologies become smarter, more powerful, smaller, lighter and cheaper. These include sensors, cameras, speech processing, image processing, biometrics, analytics, mobile and cloud technologies, geo-tagging and more, and they are increasingly powered by artificial intelligence (AI). Together, we firmly believe that these technologies will transform virtually all service sectors. Especially the advent of service robotics (virtual and physical service robots) in combination with these technologies will lead to rapid innovation that has the potential to dramatically improve the customer experience, service quality, and productivity all at the same time (Wirtz and Zeithaml 2018). Automated service interactions enable individually tailored, more efficient as well as effective services. Furthermore, they free up employees’ time for more inter-personal, creative, and complex service activities (Huang and Rust 2018). And these technologies allow scalable service offerings at virtually zero incremental costs (Wirtz et al 2019).