Special Session: Rise of the Service Robots: Exploring Consumer Acceptance: An Abstract

Abstract

Due to rapid developments of service robots, artificial intelligence and other new technologies (including big data, analytics, speech recognition, biometrics, mobile and cloud technologies, and geo-tagging) the service sector is facing a new wave of digitalization, including at the customer interface. Service robots, defined as system-based autonomous and adaptable interfaces that interact, communicate and deliver service to an organization’s customers (Wirtz et al. 2018), will bring opportunities for a wide range of service innovations that will dramatically impact the customer experience, service quality, and productivity all at the same time (e.g., many hotel, restaurant and hair stylist services are likely to be robot-delivered in the future), lower cost will make high-end services available to the broad consumer base (e.g., personal concierge services, image consulting, and high-end personal tuition), while potentially offering new services we have not thought of yet (Wirtz and Lovelock 2016).

This study explores how consumers perceive and respond to service robots. Based on conceptual and empirical data, we fine-tune and further develop an integrated framework: the service robot acceptance model (sRAM) and present a future research agenda (Wirtz et al. 2018). In the second part, we highlight that as service robotics are likely to impact all strata of society, important ethical and societal implications have to be considered. The purpose of ethics is the improvement of the general well-being of all participants in society. It especially focuses on protecting and improving personal integrity and human dignity, makes sure that the rights of the weakest in society are protected and aims at limiting possible inequalities caused by the advancement of service robotics. Our presentation will discuss crucial challenges at the micro (customers), meso (markets and organizations), and macro (society) level of analysis. Seeing the pervasiveness of service robots in the future, we also draw a number of potential approaches for these challenges from the literature and apply them to the service robotics context to provide several thought-provoking recommendations for the way forward.