Especially exciting are the opportunities offered by robotics in combination with cameras, sensors, speech recognition, big data, analytics, artificial intelligence (AI), mobile and cloud technology, geotagging and biometrics. Rapidly improving technology that becomes better, smarter, smaller, and cheaper will transform virtually all service sectors ( Wirtz and Zeithaml, 2018). The service sector seems to be at an inflection point with regard to productivity gains and service industrialization similar to the industrial revolution in manufacturing that started in the eighteenth century. The full terms of this licence may be seen at Anyone may reproduce, distribute, translate and create derivative works of this article (for both commercial and non-commercial purposes), subject to full attribution to the original publication and authors.

This article is published under the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY 4.0) licence. Kunz, Thorsten Gruber, Vinh Nhat Lu, Stefanie Paluch and Antje Martins License

A brave new world movie 2011