Generative AI in service research: promise or peril?

Abstract

Generative artificial intelligence (Gen AI), exemplified by ChatGPT, has recently garnered significant attention among researchers. The service community, in particular, has shown a growing interest in the opportunities and challenges that Gen AI presents for advancing service scholarship, including the unguided use of Gen AI in service research. This paper takes a pragmatic perspective on this game changer and discusses how Gen AI can be leveraged by service scholars across all steps of a typical research process, including idea generation, theoretical development, (experimental) stimuli design, synthetic data creation, (un)structured data analysis, and language editing tool. The paper further introduces the READY framework (Reproducibility, Ethics, Accuracy, Dependency, Yin-Yang), which provides a structured approach for the responsible and effective use of Gen AI in conducting service research. This paper thus offers timely guidance to service scholars on maximizing the benefits and values of Gen AI in their academic research endeavors.