The Office of Graduate Studies and Research at the American University of Iraq-Baghdad (AUIB), in collaboration with AUIB’s American Space, launched the Research Seminar Series, affording the university’s faculty and staff, as well as guest researchers, the opportunity to present their research and have public discussions on various topics across disciplines such as business and economics, artificial intelligence, and medical sciences.
In the first of the Research Seminar Series, Dr. Tamer Awad, Associate Professor of Marketing at AUIB, presented his research paper titled “Beyond Fragmentation: Seamless Customer Experience as a Driver of Omnichannel Adoption in Emerging Markets”, spurring a thought-provoking discussion with the audience on a paradigm shift from an era where consumers bought and owned products to another where consumers often “don’t own anything”, but are “just users” of subscription services that do not necessarily make profit by charging fees, but also, sometimes primarily, by gathering information on users and claiming a varying portion of their time, such as by imposing advertisements on non-subscription-paying users.
“Personalization (of online services) is very much connected with information collected on customers”, information that is utilized by Artificial Intelligence not to provide service as much as to garner profit at the expense of users’ privacy, including by mapping shoppers’ habits, explained Dr. Awad. The researcher also touched upon the impact of this transformation on social relationships, as shopping is now increasingly done “24/7, while sitting on a couch”, rather than by going out to the market and having face-to-face human interaction, thus “promoting loneliness.”
Beyond this shift from ownership to non-ownership of consumer products, and also the degradation of normal human interaction and social relationships, discussions at the seminar touched upon the alarming issue of control of access to purchased internet-based services, placing this aspect of the matter at hand in the broader context of how social regulation is evolving with the evolution of technology.
