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This article extends on the literature regarding brand anthropomorphism and contributes to hospitality and tourism literature by demonstrating that positioning of different anthropomorphic brand roles (partner vs. servant) attracts diverse consumers. Drawing from the results of three experiments in various contexts, we theorize that brand role and consumer implicit theories can interactively influence consumer responses. Specifically, consumers who subscribe to entity theory (vs. incremental theory) express more favorable responses to a brand anthropomorphized as a servant (vs. a partner) than to that as a partner (vs. a servant). Moreover, this study confirms that consumers’ perceived self-efficacy mediates this interaction effect. Findings enrich the hospitality and tourism literature by introducing a matching effect between brand role and implicit theories and offering insightful implications for hospitality and tourism brand managers, especially advertisers, around modifying brand roles based on consumers’ mind-sets.

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PurposeThis study serves two purposes: (1) to evaluate the effects of organizational ambidexterity by examining how the balanced and the combined sales–service configurations of chatbots differ in their abilities to enhance customer experience and patronage and (2) to apply information boundary theory to assess the contingent role that chatbot sales–service ambidexterity can play in adapting to customers' personalization–privacy paradox.Design/methodology/approachAn online survey of artificial intelligence chatbots users was conducted, and a mixed-methods research design involving response surface analysis and polynomial regression was adopted to address the research aim.FindingsThe results of polynomial regressions on survey data from 507 online customers indicated that as the benefits of personalization decreased and the risk to privacy increased, the inherently negative (positive) effects of imbalanced (combined) chatbots' sales–service ambidexterity had an increasing (decreasing) influence on customer experience. Furthermore, customer experience fully mediated the association of chatbots' sales–service ambidexterity with customer patronage.Originality/valueFirst, this study enriches the literature on frontline ambidexterity and extends it to the setting of human–machine interaction. Second, the study contributes to the literature on the personalization–privacy paradox by demonstrating the importance of frontline ambidexterity for adapting to customer concerns. Third, the study examines the conduit between artificial intelligence (AI) chatbots' ambidexterity and sales performance, thereby helping to reconcile the previously inconsistent evidence regarding this relationship.

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