ai-FaMe Team’s latest research on Physical AI is now published in the prestigious JBR. Thank you, Dr. Choi, for leading five experimental studies and bringing this work to publication!

Led by Dr. Woojin Choi and co-authored with Dr. Hyunhwan "Aiden" Lee, the ai-FaMe team’s research titled "AI service robots in physical retail: Can they reduce the intrusiveness of human retail assistants and prevent shoppers from leaving the store early?" has been sucessfully published in Journal of Business Research (JBR).

This project sits at the intersection of several research areas that deeply interest me: fashion consumer psychology, AI-enabled retail innovation, and emerging developments in embodied AI. While human retail assistants are traditionally viewed as essential to customer service, our research begins from a different premise: service interactions in physical stores can also generate psychological discomfort. In particular, consumers may experience interactions with human retail assistants (HRAs) as intrusive, evaluative, and emotionally taxing—especially in highly self-presentational consumption contexts such as fashion and beauty retail.

Against this backdrop, our research investigates whether AI retail assistants (AIRAs) can function as a less psychologically intrusive alternative to human retail assistants, and more importantly, through what psychological mechanisms these effects unfold.

Key findings

Across five experimental studies conducted in fashion and skincare brick-and-mortar retail settings, we theorize and empirically demonstrate that:

• Interactions with HRAs can heighten consumers’ perceptions of being judged, which subsequently increases perceived intrusiveness.

• Perceived intrusiveness then activates emotion-focused coping responses, leading consumers to prematurely leave the retail environment.

• Compared with HRAs, AIRAs substantially reduce consumers’ perceptions of judgment and intrusiveness, thereby mitigating stress-induced coping behaviors.

• We further identify important boundary conditions shaping these effects, including retail assistants’ smiling behavior and consumers’ shopping goal clarity.

Overall, this research contributes to the growing literature on AI service technologies by demonstrating that the advantages of AIRAs may extend beyond efficiency and convenience to include meaningful psychological benefits for consumers navigating physical retail spaces.