Many retailers invest in artificial intelligence (AI) to improve operational efficiency or enhance customer experience. However, AI often disrupts employees’ ways of working causing them to resist change, thus threatening the successful embedding and sustained usage of the technology. Using a longitudinal, multi-site ethnographic approach combining 74 stakeholder interviews and 14 on-site retail observations over a 5-year period, this article examines how employees’ practices change when retailers invest in AI. Practice co-evolution is identified as the process that undergirds successful AI integration and enables retail employees’ sustained usage of AI. Unlike product or practice diffusion, which may be organic or fortuitous, practice co-evolution is an orchestrated, collaborative process in which a practice is co-envisioned, co-adapted, and co-(re)aligned. To be sustained, practice co-evolution must be recursive and enabled via intentional knowledge transfers. This empirically derived recursive phasic model provides a roadmap for successful retail AI embedding, and fruitful future research avenues.
Dr. Francesca Bonetti is Senior Lecturer in Marketing at the London College of Fashion. Francesca is a recipient of BA Languages and Culture with Economics (University of Modena, Italy, and Durham University, UK), M.Litt Marketing (University of St Andrews, UK) and Ph.D. Marketing ( University of Manchester, UK). She is a Visiting Lecturer at universities across Europe, the USA and Asia. She is currently a Visiting Scholar at USC Marshall School of Business during 2022, conducting a research project with Professor Gerard Tellis on technological innovation in the fashion and creative industries across the USA West Coasts (Los Angeles area) and UK (London area). She is a marketing strategist, and her research interests are at the intersection of innovation, technology evolution, AI applications, marketing strategy, retailing and social practices, across markets and cultures. In particular, her specific topic of investigation is technology innovation applied to the context of fashion and creative businesses to provide solutions for organizations across cultures. Her work is published in academic journals such as the Journal of the Academy of Marketing Science, European Journal of Marketing, Journal of Retailing and Consumer Services and the International Journal of Technology Marketing, among others, and in a number of books. Francesca has extensive international industry experience as business innovator and marketing communication strategist in the fashion and apparel sector. She currently consults for established and emerging brands on digital strategy and transformation.
The seminar will be held in English.
Major information: Dr. Francesca Bonetti (Organizer: Professor Leonardo Corbo - leonardo.corbo@unibo.it)