Transcendent service management

Purpose This vision article alerts service managers to the potential of cognitive computing to reframe their value propositions. Humans are bounded in three ways: perception, rationality and physicality. Cognitive computing, hardware or software that transcends these three limits, offers many opportunities to improve the performance of service systems, in particular those focused on customer engagement. The intangibility spectrum is presented as a mental model for service managers to consider how to use cognitive computing to support augmenting their value proposition by moving across the spectrum. Design/methodology/approach Three frameworks are integrated: a five systems framework, a system's impact classification of types of cognitive computing and a tangibility spectrum. Findings Three examples illustrate the potential value of this integrative approach for service management. Originality/value This is the first integration of these frameworks, and two of them are the result of the first author's research.