Editorial

Journal of Service Research

2022, Vol. 0(0) 1–6
AI Service and Emotion © The Author(s) 2022
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DOI: 10.1177/10946705221118579
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Richard P. Bagozzi1 , Michael K. Brady2, and Ming-Hui Huang3,† 

Abstract
AI in service can be for routine mechanical tasks, analytical thinking tasks, or empathetic feeling tasks. We provide a conceptual
framework for the customer, firm, and interactional use of AI for empathetic tasks at the micro-, meso-, and macro-levels.
Emotions resulting from AI service interactions can include basic emotions (e.g., joy, sadness, and fear), self-conscious emotions
(e.g., pride, guilt, embarrassment), and moral emotions (e.g., contempt, righteous anger, social disgust). These emotions are
mostly likely to occur during frontline interactions in which both firms and customers use AI, a phenomenon called “AI as
customer.” The analysis level of AI service and emotion can be at the macro-level in which AI is transforming the service
economy into a feeling economy, at the meso-level in which firms can use “thoughtful AI” to make the employees’ and
customers’ lives a little bit better by brightening their days, and at the micro-level in which customers can experience basic, self-
conscious, and moral emotions from interactions with service AI.

Keywords
artificial intelligence, AI service, AI emotion, basic emotion, self-conscious emotion, moral emotion, AI as customer,
thoughtful AI

AI in Service Emotions from AI Interaction

AI is viewed in computer science as a thinking machine for
rational, analytical decision-making, whereas AI in service
needs to be a feeling machine for serving customers’ emotional
needs. Specifically, Huang and Rust’s (2018) multiple AI in-
telligences view proposes that AI can be designed to have the
capabilities of doing, thinking, feeling, as humans do. Me-
chanical AI is for routine service automation (e.g., self-service),
thinking AI is for personalized service (e.g., service recom-
mendation), and feeling AI is for service relationalization (e.g.,
service interaction and relationship).
The most notable novelty of this view is that AI can be
empathetic in service, which has important theoretical and
managerial implications. Figure 1 outlines a conceptual
framework illustrating how AI can be used by the customer, the
firm (and employee), and in their interaction for emotions at the
micro-, meso-, and macro-levels, from which basic, self-
conscious, and moral emotions can be experienced.
AI Emotion
Interacting with AI can generate three categories of emotion:
Basic, self-conscious, and moral emotions. Figure 2 illustrates
these categories of AI emotion. AI in the interaction can be the
customer’s agent or the firm’s agent, resulting in a longer service
interaction chain from the customer, to the customer’s AI agent,
to the firm’s AI agent, to the firm.
Early research into the adoption of technologies focused on the
functional benefits of technology (e.g., the technology accep-
tance model (TAM) reveals ease of use and usefulness as key
criteria driving adoption). As research and knowledge pro-
gressed in psychology, marketing, and other business disci-
plines, we came to the recognition that emotional processes can
be important in decision-making. Decisions and choices have
increasingly come to be seen as shaped by both thinking and
feeling, often along with social processes.
There are three categories of emotions that can be related to
AI interaction. To facilitate discussion of these, we will use the
case of a robot caregiver that one might find in health care
institutions and its interactions with patients. The principles here
1
Behavioral Science in Management, Ross School of Business, University of
Michigan, Ann Arbor, MI, USA
2
Marketing and Director, The Rockwood School of Marketing, College of
Business, Florida State University, Tallahassee, FL, USA
3
Department of Information Management, National Taiwan University, College
of Management, Taipei, Taiwan
†
The author order is alphabetical. All three authors have equal contribution
Corresponding Author:
Ming-Hui Huang, Department of Information Management, National Taiwan
University, College of Management, 1, Sec. 4, Roosevelt Rd., Taipei 10617,
Taiwan.
Email: huangmh@ntu.edu.tw
2 Journal of Service Research 0(0)

Figure 1. A conceptual framework for customer, firm, and interactional use of AI for emotions in service at the micro-, meso-, and macro-levels.

Figure 2. Three categories of emotions from AI service interactions.

apply to other types of AI or other intelligences of AI, such as
use of AI in decision-making or machine learning in various
applications.
Imagine a robot, R, caring for a patient, P, by providing
companionship, diagnosing problems, delivering services and
medicine, etc. One set of emotions, termed basic emotions,
concerns how P feels as a result of interacting with R, and deals
with goals of P and outcomes achieved or not. Basic emotions
are the most fundamental of the three categories of emotions we
will discuss, partially “hard-wired” in the brain, and learned
early in life from infancy and into the first 3 or 4 years of life,
although they are continually reinforced throughout life. They
include joy, anger, sadness, and fear, where each exhibits many
cognates. For example, happy, delighted, glad, elated, satisfied,
and proud are a few cognates of joy.
Patients experience many basic emotions interacting with R.
P might be anxious about an upcoming introduction to R and
what R could provide. He or she might later be disappointed
Bagozzi et al.
about how well R provided a specific service or alternatively
amazed and pleased with R. Likewise, P might become frus-
trated and angry with the ease of use and usefulness of R. Basic
emotional reactions to R, and what it does and how well it does
its mission, are rooted in the degree of goal achievement or
failure by P due to R. As P interacts with R, he or she might
come to like or feel affectionate toward R or dislike and even
hate R, depending on the nature and quality of the interaction.
Likewise, with deep learning or AI, the effects and outcomes
of interaction with R can be fun, and felt emotions can
moderate the evaluation, adoption, and use of such devices
(i.e., emotions can moderate the effects of functions of R on P’s
evaluation of R).
The second kind of emotion pertinent to technologies is self-
conscious emotions, which include pride, shame, guilt, em-
barrassment, envy, and jealousy. Self-conscious emotions are at
least partially hard-wired in the brain but develop later than
basic emotions (about at the ages of 4–7) and entail more so-
cialization than basic emotions. As a P interacts with R, for
instance, he or she can gain a sense of self-discovery, mastery, or
self-competence and feel pride. Of course, P might struggle with
R and feel incompetent, which could lead to feelings of em-
barrassment, or even shame. A person failing with, and
abandoning, an AI device, and thereby returning to the routines
and procedures that the device supplemented or even replaced,
might feel guilty because of the sunk costs of attempted usage.
Some persons not using an R device might become envious or
jealous of those that do.
Basic and self-conscious emotions are those that one feels by
and toward the self. They stem from one accomplishing or
failing to accomplish goals or from one experiencing good or
bad things happening to the self. However, AI also creates
emotions felt by the self but that are a result of the actions or
inactions of others, which one judges in a moral sense. This
third category of emotions is termed, moral emotions and comes
in negative and positive varieties. Imagine a P interacting with
an R where the P yells epithets towards the R, pushes it away,
and it topples over. Here a person observing such a negative
interaction might come to feel contempt, righteous anger, and
social disgust toward P, which are three classic instances of
negative moral emotions. Or a P might feel so positively toward
R that he or she speaks affectionately toward R, praises and
thanks it, and otherwise treats it admirably. Here a person
observing such a positive interaction might feel admiration,
gratitude, or even elevation or awe, which are the main instances
of positive moral emotions. Moral emotions arise when we
observe or become aware of another person (or organization)
doing good or bad things towards other people, technologies, or
organizations. They are other-directed feelings a person has
toward the admirable or disrespectful other, as opposed to basic
or self-conscious emotions, which are self-directed. People
develop moral emotions somewhat later in childhood than basic
or self-conscious emotions (say about 7–10 years of age), yet
moral emotions have neurological and physiological bases too,
like all emotions.
3
The basic, self-conscious, and moral emotions are discrete
mental states. They are independent, self-contained mental/
physiological events. A final mental entity that results from
AI interaction is a compound mental state. For example, de-
pression is not a singular emotion but rather a compound of
anxiety and sadness or sorrow. A person who successfully used
an R, say, for a long period of time but recently experienced a
technological breakdown and lost the ability to use it, might feel
very anxious and sad about its loss and be depressed. Feeling
nostalgia, bittersweet, and poignancy are also blends of multiple
emotions, and all can be felt in relation to past, present, or future
uses of AI. Discrete emotions can be experienced in multidi-
mensional horizontal and hierarchical structures. For instance,
recent research shows that products and brands can be loved,
hated, and felt to be cool, where each of these exists complexly
as structures of discrete emotions (Bagozzi et al., 1999). Finally,
some psychological reactions are combinations of emotional,
cognitive, and other non-emotional mental states. An example
particularly relevant to AI is empathy, which consists of em-
pathetic concern (an emotional state) and perspective taking
(putting oneself in the shoes of another person, a thinking state).
We can see that emotions are complex, and relate to AI in
nuanced ways. Sometimes emotions are overwhelming and
constitute the driving force in our decision-making about, and
use of, AI. Often emotions have subtle relations to AI and color,
boost, interfere with, and regulate our rational decision-making.
At the same time, emotions are more than individual, automatic
responses. When they occur, they must be coped with in ef-
fortful and deliberative ways. Anticipated emotions are essential
in goal setting and goal pursuit. And in many cases, emotions
are shared with others, shaped by the groups and organizations
to which we belong, and implanted in our social relationships.
AI is typically more than an individual issue and is embedded in,
and has implications for, our social lives, where emotion is an
essential element. We have only begun to discover the role of
emotions in our relations to AI.
AI in Frontline Interactions
The previous customer-AI interaction example illustrates the
intersection of AI and customers in emotionally rich frontline
interactions in which AI serves as the agent of the frontline
employee. Although research on AI and emotion within the
context of frontline interaction is still in the developing stage,
we believe there is a need to think about this intersection in new
ways. One obvious path is that the service research field needs to
get ahead of the industry and embrace what Rafaeli et al. (2017)
call, a “practice-driving” approach to organizational frontline
research (OFR). In other words, rather than observing what
industry has already implemented on the frontline and then
designing research questions around those observations, we
need to think proactively to conduct research that proposes new
ways for AI to drive emotionally rich frontline service inter-
actions. Below we offer some ideas that perhaps speak to a
practice-driving research approach.
4 Journal of Service Research 0(0)
Early research on AI and emotion in frontline service in-
teractions is largely focused on how AI utilized by firms impacts
customers and frontline employees. For example, numerous
articles consider how firm-initiated robots and chatbots influ-
ence customer experiences and impact frontline employees. Yet,
we know that many customers are now using AI-based digital
assistants to book appointments and make reservations
(Robinson et al. 2020), and smart refrigerators routinely place
grocery orders automatically. This “AI as customers” scenario
(Huang and Rust 2022) yields questions about the emotional
experiences of frontline employees as they interact—either
knowingly or unknowingly—with AI that is working on be-
half of the customer. The advent of customer use of AI also
generates questions around AI-to-AI frontline service interac-
tions, which have received little attention in the service literature
to date.
There is also a need for OFR that examines frontline em-
ployee emotions from new angles. A large-scale study com-
missioned by Oracle (2019) indicated that more than one-third
of employees think robots would provide more unbiased
feedback than their current managers, and nearly two-thirds
would trust a robot more than their current manager. Work is
needed that unpacks this effect and examines it across the basic,
self-conscious, and moral emotion framework, among other
angles. More generally, there is a need to look at AI-enabled
frontline service encounters from a broader lens that includes
more stakeholders, particularly managers, suppliers, and back-
of-the-office personnel, to name a few.
Along similar lines, prior service research tends to examine
the AI-frontline employee intersection only after employees are
hired and established in their roles. However, companies like
Pymetrics and Montage have developed AI-based tools that
assist with applicant screening and interviewing, respectively
(Marr 2019). Other companies are developing AI-enabled tools
to assist with employee onboarding. Research is needed that
extends the frontline employee timeline to include the very
crucial early stages of employment when emotions are fragile,
and first impressions are generated.
Finally, although the dark side of the AI-frontline employee
intersection is a tempting topic, there is a need to extend OFR to
consider the positive side. For example, Microsoft has created
an AI-enabled platform that gathers data to help employees
manage their days in ways that reduce stress, including when
they need to take breaks and end their workdays (Candelon,
et al., 2022). There is also a feature that makes it easier for
managers to send messages of appreciation to employees who
are having a bad day. In that sense, broadening, extending, and
rethinking how we look at AI-enabled service interactions offers
potential for more than driving practice—there is also an im-
portant human component to this revised line of thinking.
AI Service and Emotion
In service interactions, AI is capable of generating all three
categories of emotions—basic, self-conscious, and moral
emotions, in customers and in frontline employees. In
emotionally rich frontline interactions, the potential (or dark
side) of AI for emotion can be addressed in terms of customer
use of AI, frontline employee use of AI, and both sides’ use of
AI for emotions in service interactions. These issues can then be
addressed at three levels. At the macro-level, AI is driving the
service economy into the feeling economy in which empathy is
critical. At the meso-level, AI can be used for high-touch in-
teractions in high-tech environments in which AI platforms are
the infrastructure of interactions. At the micro-level, AI for
emotions is no longer deemed an impediment of decision-
making, but can engage customers and meet their emotional
needs.
The Feeling Economy
Thinking AI has expanded the service economy by making big
customer data available from ubiquitous customer communi-
cation and interaction for better and more personalized service
(Rust and Huang 2014), and now thinking AI is further
transforming the service economy into a feeling economy by
delegating feeling service tasks to human employees as a form
of AI-human collaboration (Huang et al., 2019). In the Feeling
Economy, AI is doing the thinking tasks, whereas humans are
doing the feeling tasks (Rust and Huang 2021). Thus, the
prevalence of AI in service pushes the service economy from
high-tech to high-touch (with feeling service being offered by
either AI, human employees, or both), and the relationship
between AI, service, and emotion becomes closer and more
complex. In this high-touch feeling economy, we see that AI can
be used to enhance customer and employee service interactions
for a better day, and we also see that AI has extended its roles
and benefits for emotions in service.
The High-Touch Companies
When considering the role of AI in high-touch service en-
counters, rather than thinking about AI in terms of what it will
do to predict and interpret customer emotions or how it can be
used to solve the firm’s most vexing problems, perhaps we
should be thinking about how AI can be used for more simple
goals, like brightening an employee’s or a customer’s day or
putting a brief smile on their faces. After all, high-touch service
is about being thoughtful, caring, and considerate, and they are
much needed in these trying times as people adjust to life with
the pandemic.
One idea in this AI/high-touch space is to extend the view of
“thinking AI” (Huang and Rust 2018) to include “thoughtful
AI.” For example, the AI-enabled systems that allow companies
like Amazon to make personalized recommendations for pur-
chases could be used to make the perfect gift suggestions for
customers (Brown 2021). The gift giver would only need to
provide basic data about the recipient that machine learning
algorithms could use to generate a personalized gift list. Firms
operating in personalized and luxury service industries, as well
as in business-to-business service spaces, could use these
systems to enhance their customers’ experiences and boost
Bagozzi et al.
customer loyalty. Customers’ stress of finding the right gifts for
others can be reduced by using these systems that enhance the
probability of giving the right gifts to the right receivers.
The goal of the high-touch companies is to solidify AI ca-
pabilities to enhance the human experience. As an example of
this potential, work is being done to develop and bring to market
an app that uses AI and smartphone-based data to monitor a
person’s happiness in real time throughout the day (Rogers
2021). The app can then be connected to smart devices in one’s
home to, among other things, adjust the lighting, play soothing
music, and open the blinds, all in an effort to promote happiness
and improve well-being. This same technology could be in-
stalled in service firms for use with frontline employees,
managers, support staff, and customers. The frontline appli-
cation is particularly promising for this technology, because
happiness is known to be more of a group phenomenon than an
individual one. We hope that AI will one day allow us to solve
some of society’s most challenging problems, but perhaps in the
interim, we should be thinking more about how firms can use AI
to make the employees’ and customers’ lives a little bit better by
brightening their days.
The Emotionally Rich Customers
Emotions were initially seen as impediments to decision-
making, and indeed emotions can contaminate or bias
decision-making in some instances. Fear can prevent cus-
tomers from processing the pros and cons of a prospective AI
and lead to dysfunctional decisions. Overly rosy feelings and
hope about the benefits of AI can block a decision maker from
processing the costs and making balanced, rational decisions.
So, self-control of emotions can be essential in some AI
contexts.
Nowadays, based on pioneering research in psychology and
emerging applications in marketing, researchers, customers,
and managers are coming to realize how essential emotions are
in decision-making and to discover how they facilitate judg-
ments and choices and lead to desired outcomes. One purpose
or function of emotions is to promote positive feelings and
meet emotional needs. This happens rather dramatically with
sex dolls and realistic artificial companions, where love and
sex are said to merge, for the human side of the interaction at
least. Indeed, AI can be used to sense and monitor human
emotions, adjust its responses to humans accordingly, and
facilitate a kind of companionship and experience of positive
emotions.
Less dramatically, AI can lead to happiness and well-being
when AI eases the attainment of personal goals or produces
positive outcomes in non-goal situations. An example of the
former is when AI keeps one informed, solves everyday
problems, or leads to overall contentment. An instance of the
latter results when a customer, upon the first encounter with a
robot server in a restaurant, is surprised, entertained, and feels
proud about how they figured out how to interact with it.
5
Positive emotional experiences with AI can be fun and
joyful, enhancing mental and physical health. Negative emo-
tional experiences can be frustrating and threaten self-esteem,
thereby harming well-being.
Emotions can prepare a person to be receptive to AI, mo-
tivate one to act favorably toward AI, and reinforce behavior
over time so as to sustain engagement. Of course, emotions can
discourage interactions with AI by inducing anxiety or antic-
ipated disappointment. Whether positive or negative, emotions
provide feedback and serve to help customers evaluate their
choices and experienced outcomes.
Emotions also help customers understand themselves and the
people with whom they interact. They help build and maintain
relationships, facilitate group behavior, and promote sociality.
These can be important facets of AI.
Finally, by saving time and money, being fun to use, and
building confidence and a sense of mastery and empowerment,
AI creates personal happiness and well-being. AI has the power
to go beyond satisfaction with service to build better lives and
businesses and enrich society.
The Special Issue Articles
In this special issue, we include articles on AI service and
emotion from all three analysis levels, cover all three categories
of emotions, and address the customer, the frontline employee,
and the interactional use of AI for emotions.
Belk’s article on love and sex doll as service workers ad-
dresses how AI can provide artificial emotional comfort for
customers at the micro-level, Skiera et al.’s information-seeking
argument mining provides a high-tech approach to improving the
provision of preferred service at the meso-level, and Mishra and
Makridis’ article on AI service and well-being provides macro
evidence for how AI drives economic growth and well-being.
For firm, customer, or interactive use of AI for emotions,
Schepers et al. and Pantano et al. investigate how firms can use
robots with different intelligences for customer emotions and
brand equity. Kipnis et al. explore how customers with dis-
abilities can benefit from robots’ empathetic capabilities. Filieri
et al. develop a hybrid machine-human intelligence approach to
identifying customer emotions arising from robot-customer
encounters.
For the three categories of emotions, El Fassi et al. address
the basic emotion of fear of replacement due to AI, Kim et al. tap
into self-conscious emotions and examine how AI alters con-
sumer self-disclosure when a personal question is asked in
service encounter. Osburg et al. examine cross-culturally dif-
ferent risk perceptions that different customer segments have
toward various autonomous vehicle services, such as whether
their loved ones are in the car, a case of moral emotions. Es-
maeilzadeh and Vaezi explore an even more fundamental issue
of machine consciousness for it to be empathic, a moral (or
compound) emotion that requires one to take the perspective of
others into consideration.
6 Journal of Service Research 0(0)
Conclusion
We have witnessed how AI has expanded the service economy,
and the various uses of AI for rational decision-making. This
special issue goes one step further to explore how AI can
transform the service economy into a Feeling Economy in which
high-touch service is enabled by high-tech infrastructure. Basic,
self-conscious, and moral emotional benefits (or disadvantages)
can be explored in customers’ and frontline employees’ use of AI
in service interactions. Eventually, the emotional benefits that can
be provided by AI or be driven by AI, hopefully, will not only
make the economy more productive but also enhance people’s
well-being that make every day a better day.
Declaration of Conflicting Interests
The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to
the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Funding
The author(s) disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the
research, authorship, and/or publication of this article: This research was
supported by grants (MOST 107-2410-H-002-115-MY3 and MOST 110-
2410-H-002-101-MY3) from the Ministry of Science and Technology, Taiwan
ORCID iDs
Richard Bagozzi  https://orcid.org/0000-0002-8807-8210
Ming-Hui Huang  https://orcid.org/0000-0001-8954-3172
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Author Biographies
Richard Bagozzi is the Dwight F. Benton Professor of Be-
havioral Science at the Ross School of Business, University of
Michigan. He holds doctores honoris causa from the University
of Lausanne, Antwerp University, and Norwegian School of
Economics. He was recognized by Thomson Reuters as the top
1% most cited researchers.
Michael Brady is the Bob Sasser Professor and Director of the
Rockwood School of Marketing at Florida State University. He
is a former winner of the Lovelock Career Contributions Award
and the immediate past Editor-in-Chief of Journal of Service
Research.
Ming-Hui Huang is Distinguished Professor of AI and service
at National Taiwan University. She is a fellow of the Association
for Information Systems (AIS) and the European Marketing
Academy (EMAC). She specializes in interdisciplinary re-
search, with publications encompassing both academic and
managerial journals in Marketing, Information Systems and
Strategy.