Interacting with customer service AI can make people act more like robots, research suggests

As AI continues to develop at a rapid pace, social robots powered by AI are becoming more commonplace in customer service settings such as retail, hospitality, tourism, and healthcare. But as these robots become smarter and appear more human, little attention has been given to how this might impact the consumers interacting with them.

Now, research from the University of Birmingham (UK), Aarhus University (Denmark), and Linnaeus University (Sweden) has found that interacting with robots displaying human-like behaviours, such as adaptive learning, personalised communication, and empathetic engagement, can reinforce, reshape, or destabilise a consumer’s self-perception.

The research has been published open access in the journal AI & Society.

Dr Inci Toral-Manson, Associate Professor of Marketing at the University of Birmingham, said: “Social robots for customer service settings are designed to mimic gestures, speech, and emotional cues to elicit cognitive and emotional responses from customers. Our research explores how dealing with these anthropomorphised robots can create a bidirectional influence, where robots become more like people, and people become more like robots, which we call ‘robotoid humanness’.”

The researchers set out a framework of human-robot interactions and how it can influence self-discovery/perception. This framework includes the service setting, consumer expectations, the robot’s appearance and speech and, crucially, the commitments (actions) from the consumer and robot.

To foster engagement with people, customer service robots use AI and learning models to mimic the behaviour of humans. This aims to instil trust and achieve the best customer engagement. People in interactions use social cues from those they interact with, often subconsciously imitating others’ behaviours or expressions, also known as mirroring. It is between the two actions in the framework that mirroring and mimicry come into effect.

Dr Selcen Ozturkcan, Associate Professor of Business Administration at Linnaeus University, explained: "The consumer acts, the robot responds, and with repeated exposure, in time the consumer internalises the exchange. Machine learning and AI can amplify this process, adjusting robot behaviour based on user input, enabling more personalised and human-like mimicry from the robot. For people, the innate instinct to mirror can lead to people returning the robot’s communicative behaviours, making them more robot-like.”

The study argues that this mirroring can cause ethical concerns, as persistent mimicry can lead to a mimicking/mirroring feedback loop, where consumer identity is shaped. It can also be constrained by repeated exposure to algorithmically driven feedback, causing confirmation bias and other negative outcomes.

These repeated interactions can also change an individual’s self-perception depending on factors such as technological readiness, cultural background, and personality traits. This creates ethical questions, especially when there may be a risk of people depending on robots for validation of their self-worth, as repeated positive reinforcement can enhance confidence in consumers, whilst negative cues may lower self-esteem.

Dr Jean-Paul Jde Cros Peronard, Associate Professor at Aarhus University, concluded: "Robots and AI are now commonplace in customer service, and so it is important that we understand how people interact with them for businesses to use the technology at their disposal to best effect, whilst remaining ethical.”

The researchers argue that as consumers see aspects of themselves increasingly reflected in robots, understanding the mimicry and mirroring process in robot-mediated services offers opportunities for connection. However, they also call for careful consideration of the cognitive and ethical consequences in shaping the consumer self.