Doctoral Position in Customer-Facing AI in Marketing and Service ETH Zürich in Switzerland

ETH Zurich is offering a doctoral position in the Center for AI Value within the Technology Marketing Group, focused on Customer-Facing AI in Marketing and Service. The project sits at the intersection of marketing, service operations, conversational AI, and human-centered machine learning, and is designed for a candidate who wants to study how generative and multimodal AI can create measurable value in real organizational settings.

The doctoral researcher will work on three linked research streams with industry partners. The first examines prompt granularity in AI voice agents: how tightly a firm should prescribe what an agent says, and how that affects reliability, compliance, repair, and task success in live voice interactions. The second investigates emotional grounding in AI-to-human handovers, asking whether emotional acknowledgement by an AI carries over when the conversation is transferred to a human employee, and how that shapes customer perceptions and recommendation intentions. The third develops multimodal prediction of marketing content performance using text and image embeddings to forecast social media engagement before publication.

The position combines controlled experiments, laboratory studies with live voice interaction, field experiments in collaboration with an insurance partner, and analysis of operational and transcript data. The successful candidate will design experiments, support pre-registration, work with experimental infrastructure for voicebot and chatbot research, extend LLM-based coding pipelines, and apply causal and psychometric methods to behavioural and operational outcomes. The role also includes work with multimodal embedding models and machine learning methods for content performance prediction.

Supervision will be provided by PD Dr. Sebastian Tillmanns and Dr. Joseph Ollier, within the broader group led by Prof. Florian von Wangenheim. The center highlights strong research infrastructure, on-premises GPU resources, confidential data handling, and close collaboration with industry partners willing to randomize in live operations. The aim is publication in leading international management journals.

Applicants should hold an MSc, MA, or MPhil in business administration, computer science, or a related field such as psychology, mathematics, engineering, physics, or statistics. The team particularly welcomes candidates from technical backgrounds who are motivated by managerial and behavioural research questions. Strong experimental and quantitative skills, excellent organization, and fluent spoken and written English are required. The post is targeted at candidates currently residing in Europe.

The contract is offered on a one-year basis, renewable up to six years, with travel and research allowances. Applications are accepted until the position is filled. Interested candidates must apply through ETH Zurich's online portal with a cover letter, CV, and transcripts/diplomas. Questions may be directed to Sebastian Tillmanns at [email protected].