Artificial intelligence (AI) has grabbed the attention of the extent of literature and customer engagement of many business organizations in the past decade, especially with the advancement of machine learning and deep learning. However, despite the great potential of AI to solve customer problems and engage customers, there are still many issues related to practical uses and lack of knowledge to create value through customer engagement. In this context, the present study aims to full fill the gap by providing a critical literature review based on 53 A* and A categories of Australian Business Deans Council (ABDC) journals (2011-2023) by highlighting the benefits, challenges, framework, and future research directions in theory, context, characteristic and methodology (TCCM) areas. These findings contribute to both theoretical and managerial perspectives for developing a future novel theory and new forms of management practices.
Top1. Introduction
In this digital era, the business world has less response time and given more attention to competitive advantage. Against this backdrop, many organizations are using the latest technology to enhance business performance. Among the many technologies, artificial intelligence (AI) has been used prominently by many organizations to attract customers and to develop different business models (Borges, Laurindo, Sp¡nola, Rodrigo, & Claudia, 2021). Artificial Intelligence refers to computational agents that act, respond, or behave intelligently in humanoid and non-humanoid forms, can perform human-instructed tasks, solve problems, analysis and interpret data for a decision (Prentice, Weaven, & Wong, 2020).
Customer engagement is a process of reaching out to customers and engaging them in cognitive, emotional, behavioral, sensorial, and social response perspectives. It is a state of mind and a psychological process that leads to customer loyalty. The outcomes of customer engagement are many like organization performance, customer repeat purchase, as well as to increase the share holders’ value (Prentice & Nguyen, 2020).
McCarthy in 1956 coined the term “Artificial intelligence”, as a science and engineering to make an intelligent machine. Though there was some slowdown of people's interest in the initial stage of this remarkable innovation but the data generated by the recent past and enhancement of computation processing capacities has made Artificial Intelligence a necessity to expand the scope in marketing, new product development, and service industry.
Considering the advantages of artificial intelligence in swift decision-making with a high-volume customer database enables organizations to make the right decision among many options of strategic planning. However, the literature evidence is not sufficient enough to support the role of AI in the strategic planning of customer engagement process. Since there is less theoretical and empirical evidence of how AI could be used to enhance customer engagement and value creation for any organization, this article attempts to address the above research gap by examining the intersection of the extent of literature about artificial intelligence and customer engagement strategy through a systematic literature review.
Last 10 years there are 53 articles have been published by 33 top category journals (A* and A Category ABDC Journals) across the globe, out of which there are only 3 review articles (Table 2) published by 11 researchers related to AI and Organization strategy, customer analytics, and social media. While going through the intext analysis, out of 53 selected articles based on predetermined inclusion and exclusion criteria published to date are related to digital assistance, E-Commerce, e-WOM, food security, gamification, health, luxury brand, online brand communities (OBC), retail, social media, value co-creation and so on. It has been observed that out of 53 selected articles, near about 36 percent (35.84%) gas given thrust to customer engagement. However, none of the authors has analyzed artificial intelligence and customer engagement from a theory, context, characteristic, and methodology (TCCM) perspective to date.
Given the identified gaps, this article highlights the concept of artificial intelligence and customer engagement, the top ten most contributing authors, potential journals, most productive countries, different themes, and sub-themes. Apart from this, a content analysis based on recently published articles in 2021, 2022, and 2023, has helped to identify the recent research trends and proposed a future research direction in artificial intelligence and customer engagement research.
In the subsequent research, a discussion on artificial intelligence and customer engagement concepts based on the identified article helped to conceptualize the idea. Justification of research, research methodology, descriptive research, future research, TCCM framework, limitation, and conclusion have been discussed.