How chatbots influence marketing

Abstract

Summary The role of digital technologies, especially the Internet of Things (IoT) and Artificial Intelligence (AI), increasingly become a key element of diverse interactions between brands and consumers. Homo Cyber Oeconomicus, one of the potential stages of ongoing consumer’s evolution, lives between processes of dehumanization of the surrounding world and humanization of digital technologies. While remaining in a constant contact with smart devices, systems and algorithms, they are looking for new values and meanings, which are a metaphor of their desires, fears and behaviors. As a result, the digital ecosystem, as an attempt to combine the humanism idea with technologization processes, poses new challenges to companies/brands, both concerning the quality of interactions with an increasingly digital consumer and tools used in that process. Chatbots can prove to be an interesting solution here, as their spectrum of potential areas of implementation in business systematically increases. The paper attempts to identify the influence of chatbots on marketing taking into account their role in Human–to–Machine interaction process. A part of these considerations is of the character of philosophical discourse on the role of that technology in human life, which is a starting point for the presentation of preliminary assumptions for a model of consumer-chatbot interaction (digital technology) in marketing activity of companies/brands.