visit Auburn.edu
Faculty: Stacey Robinson
Course Description
Artificial intelligence is fundamentally changing how customers discover, evaluate, and make decisions. For business leaders, the challenge is no longer simply adopting AI—it is understanding how AI is reshaping customer expectations, trust, and value creation across both consumer and business markets. This one-day program provides an evidence-based framework for navigating an AI-mediated marketplace. Participants will examine how AI is transforming the customer journey, where personalization and automation build trust—and where they can backfire—and how organizations can use AI to generate deeper customer insights, strengthen relationships, and drive growth. Drawing on cutting-edge research, real-world business examples, and practical exercises, the program equips leaders with actionable strategies for making smarter, more customer-centered AI decisions in an increasingly AI-enabled marketplace.
Target Audience:
Who will benefit most from this course?
- Mid level and senior marketing managers responsible for brand, demand generation, and customer acquisition
- Sales and revenue leaders focused on pipeline growth, conversion, and go to market performance
- Business development and commercial leaders responsible for growth strategy and partnerships
- Product and customer experience leaders who need stronger customer insight and analytics capability
- Digital marketing professionals managing channels, campaigns, and performance optimization
- Entrepreneurs and business owners scaling customer acquisition and revenue growth
- Strategy and general managers responsible for overall business growth and performance
- Analysts and data informed professionals supporting marketing, sales, or growth decision making
Learning Objectives & Outcomes:
- Understand how AI is changing the way customers discover, evaluate, and decide — and what that means for trust in your brand
- Examine how AI is reshaping the customer journey — from discovery and search to personalization, service, and loyalty
- Weigh the opportunities and risks of AI-driven personalization, automation, and decision support — including where it builds trust and where it erodes it
- Explore practical, real-world applications of AI for customer insight generation, innovation, and marketing strategy
- Leave with a short, practical checklist for spotting where AI is likely to build — or break — trust with your own customers.
Faculty Biography:
Dr. Stacey G. Robinson is the Jean Howard Lowe Professor of Marketing at Auburn University’s Harbert College of Business, where she studies how technology — and increasingly, artificial intelligence — reshapes the way customers make decisions and the way firms create value around them. Her research on AI-enabled service encounters, frontline technology, and customer psychology has been published in the field’s top journals, including the Journal of Marketing, the Journal of the Academy of Marketing Science, and the Journal of Business Research, where she also serves as Co-Editor.
Before entering academia, Dr. Robinson spent more than a decade in financial services as a Vice President in marketing and product-management roles at First Citizens Bancshares and Bank of America, work that continues to ground her research and teaching in the practical realities executives face when they try to turn customer data and new technology into business results. That combination — rigorous behavioral science paired with real operating experience — shapes this course: how AI is changing what customers expect, trust, and reward, and what that means for the leaders responsible for growth.
She holds a Ph.D. in Marketing and an MBA and teaches undergraduate, graduate, and executive education programs.