AI, neuro-retail and employees’ comfort: joint technologies of Transformative Service Research

After the outbreak of Coronavirus, social distancing in retail has become a need that could damage the interaction in-store between sales assistant, ambassadors of the brand storytelling, and customers, that should be emotionally engaged in order to ex-perience a positive customer journey. In closing the gap brought by the pandemic, sys-tems of Artificial Intelligence (e.g. robots, smart trolleys etc.) can be of help in keeping active the communication between brands and customers, and at the same time sanitar-ian safety, while keeping alive the process of value co-creation. Because some research also empirically demonstrated that a socially-oriented corporate identity can out-perform traditional approaches to its extension, in using AI in retail, the assessment methods should be more technology-oriented too: in doing this, neuromarketing can help evaluating the process of emotional engagement between the AI and the custom-ers, with parametric data and scientific precision. Neuromarketing can also assess the biological well-being of a customer when making purchase: in fact, beside the product knowledge through storytelling, retailers know that also environmental comfort can be an important variable of the customers’ purchase decision in the retail ecosystem. In fact, physical well-being (assessed in terms of temperature, heart rate etc.) can be a booster of activity: not only for consumers, but also for employees, that can boost their productivity. Since Transformative Service Research is a research stream aimed at creating uplifting changes and improvements in the well-being of individuals (con-sumers and employees), communities, and ecosystems, these technologies (AI, neuro-marketing, as well as digital technologies like AR and VR) can be inscribed in the frame of the eudaimonic well-being: the present contribution aims at being a review of the state of the art of the above-mentioned topics.