Consumers and Artificial Intelligence: An Experiential Perspective

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.

Capturing Marketing Information to Fuel Growth

“…Marketers must be cautious when harvesting personal information from individuals. Biometric data may be used for unintended purposes, such as facial recognition using data scraped from social media posts or retailers using video surveillance data to identify engaged prospects without obtaining their explicit consent (Puntoni et al 2021). Not only are consumers likely to vary in their privacy preferences, they may also react differently to data protection measures such as anonymization or aggregation.…”

Marketing Thinking and Doing

“…More important, it requires moving between the two worlds to try out different ideas and explanations to determine whether they offer insight into the marketing problem. Puntoni et al (2021), for example, offer sociological and psychological theories to highlight how AI shapes the customer experience. Donath (2021), an ethics commentator, offers a provocative linguistic lens.…”

Commentary: How AI Shapes Consumer Experiences and Expectations

“…How the two interact is of critical importance to marketers. Yet practitioners and scholars interested in where these two trends in business come together will miss essential issues from reading Puntoni et al (2021, hereinafter Puntoni et al), including what is distinctive about AI and how it will be deployed in the world. Moreover, by relying on extreme exceptions rather than mainstream AI uses, the authors’ view of customer experience overlooks more important everyday activities that are informative.…”