How the evolving human-AI service encounter impacts customer experience: A value co-creation perspective

This doctoral dissertation investigates how the evolving human-Artificial Intelligence (AI) service encounter impacts customer experience through the contextual lens of Value Co-Creation (VCC), examining AI’s influence across three critical VCC stages: value understanding, value creation, and value delivery. The first study (Paper 1), on value understanding, finds that heterogeneous (vs. homogeneous) AI disclosure enhances service adoption by increasing consumers’ propensity to understand AI agent relationships and perceived transparency, particularly for those with lower technology familiarity. The second study (Paper 2), on value creation, demonstrates that AI-generated (vs. human-generated) moral content supporting stigmatized groups decreases tourists’ brand avoidance, an effect mediated by psychological proximity and moderated by perceived common fate. The third study (Paper 3), on value delivery, reveals that interacting with humanoid service robots (vs. human employees) induces lower emotional intensity, leading to more reason-based (vs. feeling-based) decision strategies, moderated by service provider gender and consumer anthropomorphism tendency. Collectively, this dissertation extends VCC research by empirically establishing AI as an influential non-human actor that reconfigures co-creative dynamics. It contributes novel insights to AI disclosure research, AI’s role in ethical branding, and human-robot interaction by identifying underlying psychological mechanisms and boundary conditions. Practically, the findings offer guidance for designing AI disclosures, leveraging AI in ethical communication, and deploying service robots to foster positive customer experiences.