1) In the not-so-distant future, we can expect that human customers will interact to an increasing extent with various forms of non-human (and somewhat humanlike) agents.

2) Firms using such agents need to make sure that they behave in a satisfying way in service encounters with customers, but the search for knowledge about such behaviors does not need to start from scratch: much of what is known about the effects of the behaviors of the human employee on customers can be re-used for human-to-robot service encounters.

3) All of us need to pay attention to the possibility that repeated interactions between human customers and non-human agents can have non-intended societal effects in the same aggregated sense as, for example, literary fiction and usage of certain themes and imagery in advertising.

2024-09-25