From Artificial to Humanlike: A Systematic Literature Review of AI Humanisation and Customer Experience
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.53032/tvcr/2026.v8n4.05Keywords:
Artificial intelligence, Anthropomorphism, Humanisation, Customer Experience, Chatbots, Service RobotsAbstract
Artificial intelligence (AI) at the customer interface chatbots, voice assistants, virtual agents and service robots is increasingly designed to look, sound and behave like a human being. This review synthesises the evidence on how that deliberate humanisation shapes customer experience (CX), drawing on 57 sources published between 1994 and 2026 across marketing, information systems, hospitality and psychology. Organising the literature through anthropomorphism theory, the Computers-Are-Social-Actors paradigm and the warmth–competence framework, the review examines the design mechanisms through which AI is humanised, the effects of humanisation on trust, engagement, satisfaction and loyalty-relevant behaviour, the boundary conditions that moderate or reverse those effects, and a dark-side literature documenting uncanny-valley discomfort, privacy inference and misplaced trust. The evidence supports a positive but modest and strongly conditional relationship between humanisation and customer evaluations. Humanisation appears to operate by raising customers’ relational expectations of an AI agent: whether its effect is positive or negative depends on whether those expectations can plausibly be met, given the customer’s emotional state, the warmth demanded by the service task, the timing of disclosure and the consequences of failure. Beyond a threshold of human-likeness, and in the presence of privacy concern or perceived deception, the relationship turns negative. The review offers an integrative framework, translates the evidence into heuristics for calibrating humanisation, and identifies gaps in longitudinal, generative-AI and emerging-market evidence.
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