ABSTRACT

The wide diffusion of artificial intelligence (AI) is one of the most disrupting technological revolutions in recent human history. Yet, still little is known on how and to what extent the diffusion of AI in business practices affects brand experiences in general and brand experience co-creation in particular. While the literature dealing with brand experience is becoming increasingly consumer-centric and keener to frame brand experience as a socially-constructed and context-sensitive phenomenon, research hardly addresses the current role that AI technologies play in the creation of new and different forms of brand experience. In this chapter, we explore this “terra incognita” at the theoretical level by constructing an updated framework of brand experience co-creation that combines recent theoretical refinements of the brand experience concept with the service dominant logic of markets and actor-network theory. The developed theoretical framework results in a novel ontology of brand-experience co-creation at the time of AI which inspires theoretical and practical implications and opens avenues for future research.