Date: 06 May 2026, Wednesday
Time: 10.30 – 11.30
Place: MA-330
“AI Integration in Services: Configurations with Humans, Cognitive and Neural Mechanisms, and Their Design in the Absence of Humans”
by
Aslı Gül Kurt
HEC Montreal
Abstract
AI technologies are increasingly integrated into services, yet research has largely treated AI as a support tool for human agents. This research investigates how AI can be integrated into service delivery in ways that earn and sustain consumer acceptance. Answering this requires addressing three understudied topics: the configurations of human-AI service providers, the cognitive processes that shape consumer responses to these configurations, and the factors that drive acceptance in the absence of a human agent. This research program addresses each in sequence.
Existing work offers limited guidance on how combinations of human and AI presence shape consumer responses, or whether these effects vary across credence and experience services. The first paper addresses this configurational gap through four experiments across mental healthcare and financial advising.
Grounded in Social Presence Theory, it demonstrates that human and AI presence activate distinct relational and functional pathways, and that the dominant pathway shifts by service type, providing a configurable framework for matching human-AI roles to service context.
While configurational research identifies what works, it does not explain why. The second paper addresses this mechanistic gap through EEG and fMRI studies. It shows that active and passive human involvement increase compliance through fundamentally different cognitive routes and offers the first neural-level evidence distinguishing these pathways.
Finally, when no human agent is present, it is unclear which design attributes sustain acceptance. The third paper addresses this through a meta-analysis of 171 effect sizes from 94 studies, revealing that software-related, AI-related, and conversational attributes contribute comparably to chatbot acceptance, and offers insights on the differences in real and hypothetical chatbot interactions.
Together, these three parts provide both a theoretical account and actionable guidance for integrating AI into service delivery in ways that match the relational, cognitive, and design demands of each context.
Bio
Aslı Gül Kurt is a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Marketing at HEC Montréal. Her research explores AI integration into services across various industries, consumer perceptions of AI-assisted solutions, and how these perceptions influence consumer acceptance of such service providers. She employs experimental, neuroimaging, and meta-analytic methods to study these phenomena. She holds a B.A. in Psychology and an M.Sc. in Neuroscience from Bil