Purpose

The purpose of the paper is to note that customers are not necessarily human and to figure out how best to serve artificial intelligence (AI) customers. The authors also propose several major research streams, as examples, to help launch research on AI customers and how to serve them.

Design/methodology/approach

The current paper is a conceptual one that draws upon research from many areas to support the ideas proposed.

Findings

AI customer are proliferating. AI as customers can augment or replace human customers and can be the customer itself. Service providers may also be AI, which means that both humans serving AI customers and AI serving AI customers are relevant here. The authors show that even truly autonomous AI customers are likely to be more common in the future. The authors conclude that reverse engineering will probably not be successful in understanding AI customers and that an approach similar to how we research human consumer behavior is likely to be more useful.

Originality/value

Virtually, the entire literature on customers and how to serve them assumes that customers are human. With the rapid advancement of AI, purchase decisions are increasingly made by AI, suggesting that it is now important and necessary to consider the possibility of AI customers and how best to serve them. This paper opens the door for such research.

中文翻译：

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人工智能作为客户

目的

本文的目的是指出客户不一定是人类，并弄清楚如何最好地为人工智能 (AI) 客户提供服务。作者还提出了几个主要的研究流作为示例，以帮助启动对 AI 客户以及如何为他们服务的研究。

设计/方法/方法

目前的论文是一篇概念性论文，它借鉴了许多领域的研究来支持所提出的想法。

发现

人工智能客户正在激增。作为客户的人工智能可以增加或取代人类客户，并且可以成为客户本身。服务提供者也可能是 AI，这意味着为 AI 客户服务的人类和为 AI 客户服务的 AI 都与此相关。作者表明，即使是真正自主的 AI 客户也可能在未来变得更加普遍。作者得出的结论是，逆向工程可能无法成功地理解 AI 客户，并且类似于我们研究人类消费者行为的方法可能更有用。

原创性/价值

实际上，关于客户以及如何为他们服务的全部文献都假设客户是人。随着人工智能的快速发展，购买决策越来越多地由人工智能做出，这表明现在考虑人工智能客户的可能性以及如何最好地为他们服务是很重要和必要的。本文为此类研究打开了大门。