Artificial Intelligence and Marketing: Rethinking Knowledge through a Human-in-the-Loop Perspective

Editors

• Peilin Phua, Adelaide University
• Zachary William Anesbury, Adelaide University
• Michael Mehmet, University of Wollongong
• Kristina Klein, University of Bremen

Description

This special issue examines how artificial intelligence is reshaping marketing knowledge production, with a focus on the Human-in-the-Loop (HITL) perspective. Rather than emphasizing AI's efficiency and predictive capabilities, the collection investigates what these technological shifts mean for how marketing knowledge is generated, validated, and understood. HITL practices ensure that human judgment remains active and accountable throughout the knowledge production process.

The special issue draws on the journal's tradition of exploring how marketing knowledge is produced through practice rather than merely discovered. Contributors are invited to examine the relationship between human and AI agency in knowledge generation, including questions about expertise, rigour, and trustworthiness when AI tools are involved in research and practice. The collection welcomes conceptual, empirical, methodological, and critical perspectives on AI's broader disciplinary and institutional implications in marketing.

Potential topics

• Conceptual and theoretical work examining HITL and how AI-assisted research tools shape marketing knowledge and markets
• Socio-material and more-than-human perspectives on human–AI collaboration in marketing research and practice
• Methodological innovation in AI-assisted qualitative research, including netnography, discourse analysis, and ethnographic approaches
• Critical examination of how AI shapes the labour, expertise, and interpretive practices of marketing researchers and practitioners
• The design and evaluation of HITL systems in marketing analytics, consumer research, and decision-making, including how such systems shape knowledge production and use
• The use of AI for synthetic data generation or research alternatives, examining human oversight and its implications for knowledge claims
• Ethical and societal implications of AI in marketing knowledge production
• Research revisiting established marketing findings using AI-assisted methods (e.g., replication and generalisation across contexts), evaluating how these approaches contribute to the validation, interpretation, and enactment of marketing knowledge