Wired Path of Emotion: From human intelligence to artificial intelligence and back again

More than twenty years have passed since Spielberg's film AI broke through the collective imagination with what was, for the time, a futuristic theme of emotional connection between humans and robots. As the growing body of work on AI and emotions (Colurcio et al., 2022) shows, the role of connection, including emotional, of the robot is still of interest today (Pitardi et al., 2021) -and of concern in relation to certain aspects- in marketing research. Our work is embedded within the so-called AI-powered marketing. Based on the three-stage framework of Huang and Rust (2021), our theoretical starting point is that feeling AI can be used to interact with and analyse human emotions (Zhu et al. 2021) and that "the current practice is to use thinking AI to analyze emotional data and two-way interactions (e.g. chatbots and social bots)" (Huang & Rust, 2021, p. 32), as "true feeling AI" doesn't yet exist. Given the findings of a recent study (Chen et al., 2022) that AI-based marketing communications, while inevitable and acceptable, aren't significantly relevant to product/service evaluation or consumer behaviour, we aim to explore how AI support in interpreting emotions in marketing relationships can impact relationship success. Specifically, we want to investigate whether AI can improve the interpretation of emotions in marketing processes and enable the scaling of techniques for online negotiations. We chose the case study method because the topic is new and we want to analyse in depth (Mariotto et al., 2014; Yin, 2009) AI-enabled online negotiations. We focus on an Italian consulting firm specialised in the procurement of funding and non-repayable grants that uses facial recognition techniques to support salespeople in their online negotiations. The facial recognition tool provides salespeople with real-time information about the average arousal and attention of the customer. To understand the effective role of AI in supporting online negotiations, we focused the analysis on both the company and its AI provider. Previously, the CEO of the financial consultancy was interviewed twice directly; the founder and the developer of the provider were each interviewed twice directly. Now we analyse a csv file of 10 AI-based negotiations developed in the last 6 months The study advances knowledge about the role of artificial intelligence as an intersection for interpreting and decoding emotions for marketing processes The single case study method places limits on the generalisability of the results, but the main limitations of the research are ethical issues (Siau & Wang, 2020; Resseguier & Rodrigues, 2020) related to the safety and transparency of the negotiation as well as the possibility of a human resorting to AI to understand another human and decipher their emotions.