Sabbatical Research Project “AI promises, fallacies, and pitfalls: Inhibitors and stepping-stones for progress in Artificial Intelligence”—Final Report

This report presents the research project titled AI promises, fallacies, and pitfalls: Inhibitors and stepping-stones for progress in Artificial Intelligence. It was conducted during a sabbatical term in the winter of 2022 (and beyond), and was torpedoed by many other activities and responsibilities typical to academic life. Several publications accompanied by other research activities originated as a result, though, drops in a sea of efforts to deconstruct the AI hype, burst its scifi bubble, and provide knowledgeable account to make informed decisions about AI. This is not a research paper. It is not a literature review either, nor an opinion piece. Related and own work, abundant literature references, and theoretical analyses can be found in each of the publications that resulted from the research project. I intentionally chose to avoid repetitions or produce a new research paper here. The reader is referred to the sections below that briefly comment the most relevant results, or to read the actual publications. Finally, and very important to disclose straight from the start: no single word from this report nor from any other of my publications to date has been written with the “help” of AI, for reasons amply discussed in the papers introduced in Sections 4.4 and 4.5 below, among others. If there were something AI could undoubtedly help me with when writing, it would be with preventing my voice and ideas from being heard or read, deskilling me by confounding what is what I can or could think, tell, or write with what others have already said or written (a special feature of current generative AI), giving me the illusion of understanding what the technology has (not) experienced, and going with the massive AI-illiterate flow as a consequence. A resolute NO from me. The reader can continue reading to know about other whys

Die Chancen und Risiken des digitalen Recruitings – Wie beeinflusst die fortschreitende Digitalisierung das Recruiting?

Zunehmend stehen Unternehmen vor der Herausforderung, geeignete Fach- und Führungskräfte zu rekrutieren. Im Laufe der Digitalisierung wurden in den vergangenen Jahren neue Personalbeschaffungswege entwickelt, durch die mit Hilfe von Softwares und Algorithmen trotz des Talentmangels passende Bewerber gefunden werden sollen. Das Ziel dieser Arbeit ist die Analyse der Chancen und Risiken des digitalen Recruitings. Es wird untersucht, inwiefern die Digitalisierung das Recruiting beeinflusst und ob Technologien in Zukunft den Menschen in der Personalwirtschaft ersetzen können. Dabei werden die traditionellen Personalbeschaffungsmethoden mit dem E-Recruiting verglichen. Im Rahmen dieses Forschungsprojektes wird ein Interview durchgeführt, um zu untersuchen, wie erfahrende Headhunter die Zukunft des digitalen Recruitings einschätzen

Control of the customer journey in online marketing using the example of online holiday accommodation booking

Consumer behaviour changed with the emergence of the Internet. Thereupon, companies are facing new challenges as well as opportunities in terms of online marketing. While it became more difficult for firms to analyse the importance of each channel during a customer-online-journey, mastering this process on the other hand, provides the opportunity of reducing advertisement costs by targeting the appropriate customer segments. Hence, this research analyses the difficulty, which marketers face in regard to research shoppers and the perceived importance by consumers of the channels used in a customer-online-journey. Moreover, this research investigates in the influence of demographic consumer characteristics and purchase involvement on consumers’ online channel choice. The findings do not support the existence of research shoppers, since the significant majority of the consumers make the purchase through the same channel, which they have used during their information search. The hypotheses, which analyse the correlation between consumers’ demographic characteristics as well as purchase involvement and consumers’ channel choice are only partially accepted. Age reveals a significant correlation with online channel preference relating to e-mail and direct search. Further, gender indicates a significant correlation with channel preference regarding social media. The latter, as well as search engine indicate a significant difference in the perceived relevance by consumers, who show different purchase involvement. The findings of the research contribute to the literature by answering a research gap on consumers’ online channel choice. Marketers benefit from the implications drawn by the findings in order to conduct online segmentation