Special issue on AI-powered E-commerce and information management

Introduction:

In recent years, artificial intelligence (AI) has been deeply integrated with customer service and supply chain optimization, reshaping e-commerce with great changes. Based on its powerful analysis competence and excellent learning ability, AI presents opportunities to gain useful insights from big data, promote information management, and perform several tasks autonomously that were previously performed by humans. For example, AI-powered recommendation systems and chatbots can help to provide precise, convenient, and personalized customer services, thus improving customers’ experience and employees’ work efficiencies. Although increasing research focusing on AI-powered E-Commerce has explored the impact of AI on the behavior of customers and employees, the emerging Generative Artificial Intelligence (GAI) such as ChatGPT is calling into question our existing assumptions due to the tendency to transform from weak AI to strong AI.

Given the ubiquitous use of AI in e-commerce today, there are many fascinating phenomena and research questions that are understudied. For example, the horrendously accurate recommendation algorithms may bring information cocoon problems, limiting customers from obtaining diverse information. It may also give customers a sense of being monitored, raising privacy concerns. For employees, AI increasingly threatens their work processes and even replaces their jobs. These phenomena highlight the significant negative or detrimental consequences of AI to customers, employees, and organizations that are worthy of further research attention. Therefore, in the context of AI-powered e-commerce, we call for a need to understand the role of AI’s characteristics like autonomy, investigate the resources and mechanisms of the ethics issues like privacy, and explore how better human-AI interactions and information management can be achieved by interaction designs.

Topics covered:

Potential topics of this research topic should include, but not be limited to:

• AI-powered information management, analysis, and optimization
• Customer behaviors and experience in AI-powered e-commerce
• Employee behaviors and performance in human-AI collaboration
• Organization strategies and business model innovations in AI-powered e-commerce
• Design for human-AI interaction
• Explainability, robustness, responsible AI in e-commerce
• Algorithmic bias and fairness issues
• Information cocoons and elimination
• Ethics issues (e.g., trust, privacy, and accountability) and governance
• The impact of GAI in e-commerce
• Emerging e-commerce and information management issues in the age of AI
• AI and platform economy
• The social and regulations issues related to AI
• Intelligent applications in industries (e.g., healthcare, e-commerce, and manufacturing)

Important deadlines:

(1) The submission due date for ICEC2024 is February 28, 2024, and conference dates are May 29-31, 2024 in Seoul as posted at https://www.icec.net/cfp.

(2) The submission schedule of revised papers and new voluntary and invited submissions are:

Submission deadline: July 31, 2024

Notification of first round reviews and acceptance: September 30, 2024

Revised manuscripts due: November 30, 2024

Notification of second round reviews and acceptance: January 15, 2025

Final manuscript due: February 28, 2025

Last date for final acceptance: April 15, 2025

Submission instructions: Please read the Guide for Authors before submitting. All articles should be submitted online; please select AI-powered E-Commerce and Information Management upon submission.

Guest editors:

• Dr. Zhaohua Deng, Professor, Huazhong University of Science and Technology, China  Email: zh-deng@hust.edu.cn

• Dr. Shan Liu, Professor, Xi’an Jiaotong University, China  Email: shanliu@xjtu.edu.cn

• Dr. Kyoung Jun Lee, Professor, Kyung Hee University, South Korea  Email: klee@khu.ac.kr

• Dr. Haibing Lu, Professor, Santa Clara University, USA  Email: hlu@scu.edu

For further inquiries, please send emails to dsm@xjtu.edu.cn, and the editing team will answer promptly.