This book takes a fresh stance and views EI and AI as services that are provided by service employees and machines as organisational offerings to customers. As emotional intelligence (EI) and artificial intelligence (AI) have been cited to have broad effects on individuals, businesses and beyond, this book is focused on the organisational context, specifically how they affect employees and customers from a marketing perspective. The stance in this book is consistent with the conceptualisation of a service. This book holds that intelligence in businesses must turn into organisational assets to manifest their values. Further, this book explores this service-dominant logic era, and compared to tangible products, service plays a key role in organisational performance and customer relationship with the organisation. Intelligence exhibited either by human or machine is not a tangible product, but can be utilised as a service to assist employees in performing tasks and delivering services as well as facilitating business transaction and customer experience.
This book is structured as follows. Chapters 2 and 3 demystify emotional and artificial intelligence, from different perspectives, including conceptualisations, the history and evolution of the concepts, how they function and where they can apply to. These discussions help readers understand what exactly these two intelligences are. Chapters 4 and 5 analyse how emotional intelligence is related to employees and customers, respectively, with a focus on service organisations. Chapters 6–8 are dedicated to anatomising AI and how it is operationalised as a service to influence employees and customers. Specifically, viewing AI as a service, Chapter 6 examines the impact of AI service quality and how it is related to employee service quality. Chapter 7 analyses the influence of AI service quality on customers. Based on the discussion in Chapters 6 and 7, Chapter 8 is extended to develop a scale to measure such AI service, named AI service quality.
The last three chapters of this book integrate EI and AI to analyse their respective impacts on employees and customers. Chapter 9 proposes EI as a moderator of AI, whereas Chapter 10 proposes AI as a moderator of EI. Chapter 11 employs service profit chain to integrate EI and AI in the chain relationship to understand their effects on both employees and customers. This chapter broadly covers the service industry with a focus on tourism and hospitality sector. The discussion on the impact of EI and AI is complemented with empirical studies conducted in tourism or hospitality context to address their effects in these sectors.
