AI, Neuro- and Smart-Retail and Employees’ Comfort: Joint Technologies of Transformative Service Research

Abstract

After the outbreak of Coronavirus, social distancing in retail has become a need that could damage the interaction in-store between sales assistant, ambassadors of the brand storytelling, and customers, that should be emotionally engaged in order to experience a positive customer journey. In closing the gap brought by the pandemic, systems of Artificial Intelligence (e.g. robots, smart trolleys etc.) can be of help in keeping active the communication between brands and customers, and at the same time sanitarian safety, while keeping alive the process of value co-creation. Because some research also empirically demonstrated that a socially-oriented corporate identity can out-perform traditional approaches to its extension, in using AI in retail, the assessment methods should be more technology-oriented too: in doing this, neuromarketing can help evaluating the process of emotional engagement between the AI and the customers, with parametric data and scientific precision. Neuromarketing can also assess the biological well-being of a customer when making purchase: in fact, beside the product knowledge through storytelling, retailers know that also environmental comfort can be an important variable of the customers’ purchase decision in the retail ecosystem. In fact, physical well-being (assessed in terms of temperature, heart rate etc.) can be a booster of activity: not only for consumers, but also for employees, that can boost their productivity. Since Transformative Service Research is a research stream aimed at creating uplifting changes and improvements in the well-being of individuals (consumers and employees), communities, and ecosystems, these technologies (AI, neuromarketing, as well as digital technologies like AR and VR) can be inscribed in the frame of the eudaimonic well-being: the present contribution aims at being a review of the state of the art of the above-mentioned topics.