Second, this article examines consumer perceptions, beliefs and behaviors as related to robot-delivered service and advances the service robot acceptance model (sRAM). First, it provides a definition of service robots, describes their key attributes, contrasts the key features and capabilities of service employees and service robots, and provides an understanding for which types of tasks robots will dominate and where humans will prevail. Figure 1 provides an overview of the key relationships and impacts of service robots that will be discussed and where this article makes the following three contributions. societal implications) for all key stakeholders. the market for a particular service and market prices) and macro level (e.g. individual customer experience), meso (e.g. In particular, service robots will have important implications at the micro (i.e.

The aim of this paper is to explore the potential role service robots will play in the future. The likely impact of the infusion of robots in conjunction with AI and machine learning on frontline employees across industries and settings has attracted significant attention from business practitioners ( Lelieveld and Wolswinkel, 2017 Manyika et al., 2017 Microsoft, 2018) and recently also from service scholars ( Huang and Rust, 2018 Marinova et al., 2017 Čaić et al., 2018 van Doorn et al., 2017).

Especially exciting are the opportunities offered by robotics in combination with cameras, sensors, speech recognition, big data, analytics, artificial intelligence (AI), mobile and cloud technology, geotagging and biometrics. Rapidly improving technology that becomes better, smarter, smaller, and cheaper will transform virtually all service sectors ( Wirtz and Zeithaml, 2018). The service sector seems to be at an inflection point with regard to productivity gains and service industrialization similar to the industrial revolution in manufacturing that started in the eighteenth century. The full terms of this licence may be seen at Anyone may reproduce, distribute, translate and create derivative works of this article (for both commercial and non-commercial purposes), subject to full attribution to the original publication and authors. This article is published under the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY 4.0) licence. Kunz, Thorsten Gruber, Vinh Nhat Lu, Stefanie Paluch and Antje Martins License

Brave robot