“That is contradictory. Innovative, digital services can signal to the customer that the company has strong innovative capabilities, which can be attractive. Yet we still seem more willing to adopt services that feel ‘harmless’, easy to understand and relatively simple. For example, it may be easier to choose an AI service that removes the background from an image than one that makes decisions related to your finances”.
These are the words of Joanna Pilawa, who defended her doctoral thesis in Business Administration at Linköping University in December 2025.
We wanted to see
how customers react
The thesis is based on four separate studies. Joanna Pilawa studied digital services and services based on artificial intelligence (AI) from several different perspectives. For example services that include AI-generated chat robots, or chatbots. She also ran studies closely with consumers. Joanna Pilawa used both an AI-powered physical robot and virtual AI-enabled services (like apps or chat GPT). She used so-called web scraping to collect and analyse ratings and saves from around 12,000 different digital services in several countries.
Innovation
“We wanted to see how customers react to services with varying levels of intelligence – in other words, how they perceive the services and how satisfied or dissatisfied they are. Since we used secondary data in this study, we did not have direct contact with customers but relied on service descriptions, ratings and similar information" says Joanna Pilawa.
In this field, the concept of service innovation refers to developing new or improved services, such as new ways of delivering customer support, digital solutions or entirely new service concepts. Another key concept is service innovativeness, which describes an organisation’s capacity or tendency to be innovative in its services.
“A high level of service innovativeness can make it easier for an organisation to succeed with its service innovations, as it indicates that the organisation has structures, culture and resources that promote new thinking” says Joanna Pilawa.
Services differ
The new AI services differ somewhat from the digital services we have known so far, as they are wholly or partly autonomous. “Technology has traditionally been highly dependent on humans and unable to make its own decisions. This does not apply to AI. That is why I wanted to explore how AI changes the landscape for service innovation”.
Joanna Pilawa found that customers were more or less willing to use AI services depending on what the service involved. She also discovered that customers perceived the company differently if it offered innovative services.
“In all cases, we found that higher service innovativeness led to greater customer satisfaction. Service innovation is not merely a functional improvement – it also signals an organisation’s innovativeness in services, something customers may perceive as positive”
Finally, she examined adoption, meaning customers’ willingness to use the services.
“This was a little more complicated because the study showed two different results. For ordinary digital services, we found that the higher the service innovativeness, the higher the adoption.”
Exception
AI services were the exception, where customers became more cautious.“In those cases, high service innovativeness did not help much. Customers were less willing to adopt innovations when they were based on AI”.
What could this knowledge lead to?
“Companies need to take this into account. A complex, innovative and technical service may require helping the customer feel secure. Businesses need to understand customers’ perceptions in order to create services that are appreciated”, says Joanna Pilawa.
