Corporate Digital Responsibility at the Dawn of the Digital Service Revolution

Abstract

Digitization, artificial intelligence (AI), and service robots will revolutionize virtually all service industries and have the potential to bring unprecedented improvements in customer experience, service quality, and productivity. However, these technological advances also carry serious ethical, fairness, and privacy risks. To explore these risks, this article builds on recent work on corporate digital responsibility (CDR). First, it uses a life-cycle stage perspective of data and technologies (i.e., their creation, operation, refinement, and retainment) as an organizing frame to better understand these risks. Second, to provide insights on where these risks originate, it examines an organization’s business model and its flows of money, service, data, insights, and technologies with customers at the front-end and the business partner ecosystem at the back-end. Third, this article identifies why CDR issues occur. It shows that trade-offs between good CDR practices and five organizational objectives and motivations are key underlying causes (e.g., incremental sales can be achieved with better data and analytics but carry a gamut of privacy, fairness, discrimination and psychological risks). Finally, this article proposes a set of strategies, tools and practices managers can use to address these trade-offs and build a CDR-strong service organization.