Emotion, Cultural Valuation of Being Human and AI Services

This study alerts that successful AI services depend not only on the improvement of the ability of AI to understand customers’ emotions but also on whether the utility function of the customer allows for the perfect substitution between an AI-delivered service and a human-delivered service. We argue that the utility function of customers includes the subjective valuation of being human, which AI services cannot meet by nature. A culture-based development (CBD) model for the transformation of emotions into feelings and order of preferences is offered to explain the cultural valuation of being human as a component of customers’ utility function. Using primary data from an experimental survey and employing two alternative machine learning algorithms (Lasso and Random Forest), we operationalize our CBD model to show that the estimation efficiency of the AI algorithms cannot compensate for the omission of the cultural valuation of being human from the modeling of the utility function of the customer.