Paradigm of Value Cocreation and Artificial Intelligence: Exploring constitutive themes of agency, resources, and interaction

Understanding value creation, defined as practices through which entities contribute to emergence of positive or negative preference experiences, has remained the central aim for marketing and business scholars for several decades. This pursuit is driven by the continuous emergence and implementation of new technologies affecting practices through which value is created. Among the existing technologies, the development and implementation of those that demonstrate intelligence by mimicking human behaviour or by acting or reasoning rationally (i.e., artificial intelligence [AI]) are suggested to constitute profound transformation in not only how value is created in the marketing and business context but also the paradigmatic ideas behind value and its creation. Thus, this dissertation explores the ramifications of AI on how value creation is understood in the marketing and business literature.

Regarding how value creation is understood, this dissertation refers to paradigmatic preconditions that guide thinking when researchers form theoretical arguments on value creation-related concepts. This dissertation focuses on the paradigm of value cocreation that has gained increasing traction during the last 30 years, reaching a widely acknowledged status within marketing and business thought related to value creation. The value cocreation paradigm posits that value is experiential and emerges through practice rather than being embedded in matter. Thus, the creation of value does not follow the roles of the producer as value creator and the customer as value consumer. Instead, value is created by multiple entities; each introducing their time and other resources to the practice of value creation. While the vast number of preceding studies have recognized the transforming role of AI in the practices of value creation, no examination of ramifications on AI to paradigmatic ideas of value cocreation has been considered.

Although value cocreation can be identified as a distinctive approach in the literature on value creation, affording the label of paradigm, value cocreation perspectives are not unified. Instead, the paradigmatic idea of cocreation is a set of weakly tied ideas among different schools of thought within marketing and strategic business management. Thus, to examine the ramifications of AI to the paradigm of value cocreation, the dissertation first identifies constitutive themes that exhibit cross-field relevance in the literature on value cocreation. Besides identifying constitutive themes, the dissertation discerns divergent approaches within these themes, thereby revealing areas of disagreement in the literature. Constitutive themes and divergent approaches are identified by relating theoretical statements to one another in the process of problematisation. These theoretical findings are then related to empirical observations on AI in the value creation practices of companies through the abductive process.

The dissertation identified three themes that the literature on value cocreation considers constitutive: agency, resources, and interaction. Within these themes, the dissertation identified three diverging approaches toward agency and two towards resources. The agency was approached either through actor-based, institutional or relational views. Actor-based approaches consider actors as basic abstractions for the emergence of action in value creation. According to this view, actors have dispositions that allow them to act and, thus, participate in value creation. This results in heterogenous relations emerging from actors interacting. Institutional approaches also consider agency through the abstraction of the actor but highlight that actors’ actions are enabled and constrained by social institutions. Relational views do not consider actors to precede actions but consider the emergence of action inseparable from heterogeneous relations that constitute the acting entities. The dissertation found resources to be approached either as essentialists or nonessentialist. Essentialist approaches consider resources to have inherent properties that allow them to be used in value creation. Nonessentialist approaches regard resources as practical outcomes of their context. The current dissertation did not identify any diverging approaches towards interaction in the value cocreation literature. Literature implicitly agreed with the conceptualisation that interaction is considered a relation—or the formation of one—in which entities have some effect on each other.

Empirical findings supported relational agency approaches and nonessentialist resource approaches. From the perspective of agency, the dissertation did not observe AI as an identifiable entity. Instead, AI became through the heterogenous relations consisting of data, AI method, as well as human and other than human entities. From the perspective of resources, AI was found to affect the applicability of resources (both material and nonmaterial), already recognized by organizations. Furthermore, AI “created” new resources as data became a resource enabling the AI to act or reason. In terms of interaction, AI was found to guide the content and ways of human actors interacted in value creation. However, this was not considered to have implications on how value cocreation literature conceptualises interaction.

To summarise, the findings emphasise that AI does not exist outside the relations between the AI method, data, and other entities interacting with AI. Instead, the above-mentioned relations became resources that allowed the AI to act or reason as it did in the relations in which AI was used in a value-creating manner. Thus, each relation came to play the role of resource, simultaneously constituting the AI as “an actor”. The dissertation summarises the above findings with a concluding proposition: In value creation, actors emerge as resources become, which can be empirically tested by examining other types of entities/actors than AI.

This dissertation contributes to the discussion on value cocreation. The findings contradict the ontological grounds of actor-based agency approaches and essentialist resource approaches. They question common perception, that entities (human and nonhuman) participating in value creation act based on inherent dispositions. Thus, the concluding proposition of the dissertation offers an ontological option for actor-based approaches towards value creation–related phenomena, allowing future research to structuring hypotheses on phenomena previously unknown.