Service robots, customers and service employees: what can we learn from the academic literature and where are the gaps?

Purpose Robots are predicted to have a profound impact on the service sector. The emergence of robots has attracted increasing interest from business scholars and practitioners alike. In this article, we undertake a systematic review of the business literature about the impact of service robots on customers and employees with the objective of guiding future research. Design/methodology/approach We analyzed the literature on service robots as they relate to customers and employees in business journals listed in the Financial Times top 50 journals plus all journals covered in the cross-disciplinary SERVSIG literature alerts. Findings The analysis of the identified studies yielded multiple observations about the…