Journal
JOURNAL OF THE ASSOCIATION FOR INFORMATION SYSTEMS
Volume 22, Issue 2, Pages 418-458Publisher
ASSOC INFORMATION SYSTEMS
DOI: 10.17705/1jais.00667
Keywords
Smart Personal Assistants; Value Co-Creation; Smart Services; Affordances
Funding
- German Research Foundation (DFG) [348084924]
- University of St.Gallen
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In the realm of smart services, smart personal assistants (SPAs) have become popular for value co-creation between service providers and users. The innovative material properties of SPAs, such as natural language user interfaces and machine learning-powered request handling, offer users new ways to achieve their goals and co-create value. By theorizing the effects of different types of SPAs on users' value co-creation processes, researchers and practitioners are urged to rethink value co-creation and revise affordances theory to address the dynamic nature of smart technology as a service counterpart.
In the realm of smart services, smart personal assistants (SPAs) have become a popular medium for value co-creation between service providers and users. The market success of SPAs is largely based on their innovative material properties, such as natural language user interfaces, machine learning-powered request handling and service provision, and anthropomorphism. In different combinations, these properties offer users entirely new ways to intuitively and interactively achieve their goals and thus co-create value with service providers. But how does the nature of the SPA shape value co-creation processes? In this paper, we look through a functional affordances lens to theorize about the effects of different types of SPAs (i.e., with different combinations of material properties) on users' value co-creation processes. Specifically, we collected SPAs from research and practice by reviewing scientific literature and web resources, developed a taxonomy of SPAs' material properties, and performed a cluster analysis to group SPAs of a similar nature. We then derived 2 general and 11 cluster-specific propositions on how different material properties of SPAs can yield different affordances for value co-creation. With our work, we point out that smart services require researchers and practitioners to fundamentally rethink value co-creation as well as revise affordances theory to address the dynamic nature of smart technology as a service counterpart.
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