Collaboration with machines in B2B marketing: Overcoming managers' aversion to AI-CRM with explainability

This paper links negative emotions to AI and examines their influence on aversion to collaborating with AI in customer relationship management. It aims to understand working with AI-CRM and considers AI-based recommendations in marketing decision-making. This article is empirically supported by three experimental studies involving over seven hundred B2B customer relationship management-committed managers. It demonstrates that eXplainable Artificial Intelligence (XAI) is a tool that can help mitigate the dark sides of collaboration with AI and increase the propensity to incorporate its suggestions in customer relationship management decision-making.