Brave New World: Service Robots in the Frontline

Our economy is facing a turning point in its history similar to the industrial revolution in manufacturing that started in the 18th century. Robotics and Ai in combination with rapidly improving technologies (including sensors, cameras, speech recognition, big data, analytics, artificial intelligence (AI), biometrics, mobile and cloud technologies, geo-tagging, drones and autonomous vehicles) are about to transform virtually all service sectors. This 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. For example, most customer contact centres will be ‘manned’ by AI. Almost all information-type services from information counters to medical diagnoses, and even hotel, restaurant and hair stylist services are likely to be largely robot-delivered in the future. Dramatically 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.

Our article examining the role service robots are likely to play and their impact on consumers, organizations, markets and society has just been published. As this article is an open access publication, feel free to distribute hard and soft copies of the original version of this article. Download the Full Article – Click Here.

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