AI and New Forms of Market Interaction to Enhance Customer Experience—A Management Perspective

Artificial intelligence-based solutions are radically transforming marketing environments and companies’ customer interaction, with short-term opportunities, but with long-term challenges from management perspective. We explore marketing managers’ attitudes toward artificial intelligence marketing channels, the potential impact of artificial intelligence on customer interaction, and the challenges that impact marketing managers’ ability to use artificial intelligence to enhance customer experience. In addressing these issues, we adopt an exploratory interpretive approach. Primary data were collected by semi-structured interviews with 12 senior managers, having key-roles in their organizations’ marketing structures or related to customer interaction structures. These revealed challenges, involving an accurate understanding of the technical possibilities, managing organizational capacities and competencies, and leading coherent organizational change. Our main recommendations with practical implications are: (1) Companies need to take proactive steps to become learning organizations, ensuring that they are alert to all relevant possibilities and potential; (2) businesses need to develop dedicated strategies, including a senior leadership role to ensure the agenda is properly represented and evaluated against competing priorities; dedicated teams for studying, innovating, and implementing new interaction channels; focused and ambitious financial commitment; strategic collaborations with entrepreneurs and relevant start-up companies; mechanisms for garnering feedback from customers; developing appropriate internal change management strategies; and establishing meaningful key performance indicators to measure achievements; (3) strategies need to be integrated within a self-conscious organizational culture that sets an overall rate of change and which understands that these radical changes warrant patience in terms of results, building appropriate institutional resilience, with proper attention to cultural issues and business ethics.