The use of artificial intelligence (AI) service robots is on the rise. With service frontlines gradually shifting to human–robot interactions, the question of whether AI robots should be humanlike or machinelike has emerged. While many firms use robots that resemble humans in their appearance and actions, others use machinelike robots, assuming that very humanlike robots may lead to uncanny valley effects. There is no consensus on whether the anthropomorphism of service robots facilitates or constrains consumers’ experiences. To fill this gap, this article examines when and how service companies should use anthropomorphic AI service robots.

Recently, brand managers have widely adopted brand anthropomorphism as positioning strategies to differentiate from other competitors. Aggarwal and McGill (2012) anthropomorphized brand as two specific roles. Brand-as-partner refers its role as “the co-producer of benefits”, a relationship in which the brand and consumers work together to co-create the benefits as equals. However, brand-as-servant represents its role as “the outsourced provider of benefits”, a hierarchical relationship in which the brand works for consumers to create benefits. Our research extends prior literature by investigating how a brand can improve consumers’ responses with the anthropomorphization of being either a collaborative partner or a supportive servant, depending on consumer’s mind-set  aptly termed implicit theories. Implicit theories are the beliefs that people have about the nature of human characteristics. In specific, entity theorists believe human traits are relatively fixed and stable; and incremental theorists believe human traits are substantially changeable (Dweck & Leggett, 1988). These two implicit theories trigger many distinctive cognitive and behavioral patterns. For example, entity theorists prefer effortless success and receiving assurances to signal their abilities. In contrast, incremental theories emphasize on self-improvement through high effort to realize their self-enhancement and intentions (Park & John, 2014). We generalize this theory to anthropomorphic brand positioning and adopt consumer’s efficacy (confidence) to explain the underlying mechanism. We hypothesize a servant brand is more appealing to entity theorists, because they prefer situations in which they are guaranteed of being satisfied effortlessly (Dweck & Leggett, 1988). Therefore, they are more confident about their abilities when a servant brand acts as an assurance for providing benefits. In contrast, a partner brand may be more attractive to incremental theorists, because they believe their abilities can be improved through working with the partner brand. Thus, they should be more self-assured about their abilities, and increase their perceived efficacy to realize their intentions. Three studies were conducted to test the hypotheses by both manipulating and measuring implicit theories. The consistent results revealed the significant interactions between brand roles and implicit theories on brand evaluation as well as the mediation effect of consumer efficacy. In sum, this research contributes to brand managers by advising them to cultivate appropriate brand role position in accordance with the target and potential consumer’s distinct mind-set.