Jochen Wirtz

Service organisations are being asked to deploy AI agents and intelligent automation faster than their operating models can absorb them. Leaders know the productivity case, but the harder question is what the customer relationship, the workforce, and the cost-to-serve actually look like once agents handle the work front-line teams used to own. Most transformation programmes underestimate that redesign and end up automating the old service blueprint instead of rebuilding it.

Jochen Wirtz is a services marketing scholar at NUS Business School who helps leaders rebuild service businesses around AI agents, automation, and platform models without losing the customer.

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Why organisations work with Jochen Wirtz

  • He wrote the textbook the global services marketing field teaches from. Services Marketing: People, Technology, Strategy, co-authored with Christopher Lovelock, has sold over a million copies and shaped how MBAs are taught the discipline in more than 26 countries.
  • He has paired that academic authority with two operator-facing AI books, Intelligent Automation and Agentic Artificial Intelligence, written with Pascal Bornet. Few service strategy voices can speak as fluently to both a CMO and a Chief Automation Officer.
  • His Christopher Lovelock Career Contributions Award from the American Marketing Association and the Gronroos Service Research Award are the two most senior honours in the global services research community. Boards get a recognised authority, not a generalist.
  • He has been Clarivate Highly Cited Researcher in economics and business in 2022, 2023, and 2024, which means his frameworks are the ones other researchers and practitioners are actively building on.
  • He spent fifteen years running the UCLA-NUS Executive MBA Programme as founding director, so the audiences he addresses most naturally are senior leaders, not students.

Biography highlights

  • Vice Dean of MBA Programmes and Professor of Marketing, NUS Business School, National University of Singapore.
  • Co-author of Services Marketing: People, Technology, Strategy (9th edition) with the late Christopher Lovelock, adapted for over 26 countries.
  • Co-author of Intelligent Automation (2021) and Agentic Artificial Intelligence (2025) with Pascal Bornet, with contributors including Thomas H. Davenport.
  • Christopher Lovelock Career Contributions Award (AMA, 2019) and Christian Gronroos Service Research Award (2024).
  • Clarivate Highly Cited Researcher in economics and business, 2022, 2023, and 2024; over 200 academic articles and six features in Harvard Business Review.
  • Academic Scholar at Cornell Institute for Healthy Futures; International Fellow at Karlstad University Service Research Center; Global Faculty at Arizona State University Center for Services Leadership.

Biography

Service businesses are where AI is hitting the operating model first. Customer interactions, advisory work, claims handling, hospitality, healthcare reception, professional services delivery: all of it is being rewired around intelligent agents, and very few people on the academic side have stayed close to that shift in practical terms. Jochen Wirtz has.

He is Vice Dean of MBA Programmes and Professor of Marketing at NUS Business School, and the co-author, with the late Christopher Lovelock, of Services Marketing: People, Technology, Strategy. The textbook is now in its ninth edition, has sold over a million copies, and has been adapted for more than 26 countries. It is the spine of the discipline globally.

What makes him useful in a leadership room rather than a classroom is the second body of work. With Pascal Bornet he wrote Intelligent Automation in 2021 and Agentic Artificial Intelligence in 2025, with contributions from Thomas H. Davenport and others. Both are written for operators making real choices about where to put AI inside their service architecture and where not to.

The credentials line up behind that: the Christopher Lovelock Career Contributions Award from the American Marketing Association, the Christian Gronroos Service Research Award, three consecutive years as a Clarivate Highly Cited Researcher in economics and business, and fifteen years as founding director of the UCLA-NUS Executive MBA Programme. Boards get an academic with the authority to set the agenda and the operator literacy to follow it through.

Key speaking topics

  • Services marketing and service management
  • AI agents and intelligent automation in service organisations
  • Service strategy and organisational redesign
  • Customer experience in AI-enabled service
  • Platform business models
  • Corporate digital responsibility and governance
  • Cost-effective service excellence

Ideal for

  • CEOs, COOs, and CMOs of service-led businesses redesigning operations around AI agents.
  • Chief Digital, Transformation, and Automation Officers building the AI-and-services roadmap.
  • Boards and executive committees in financial services, professional services, hospitality, healthcare, and telecoms working through service productivity and customer impact at the same time.

Audience outcomes

  • A clearer view of where AI agents create durable advantage in a service business and where they create new risk.
  • A working vocabulary for the service strategy choices behind automation programmes, drawn from the field’s leading textbook.
  • Frameworks from Intelligent Automation and Agentic Artificial Intelligence that translate AI investment into service design decisions.
  • A sharper sense of corporate digital responsibility as service interactions become increasingly machine-mediated.
  • Confidence that the operating model conversation and the customer experience conversation are the same conversation.

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