Emotion AI, a subset of AI that measures, understands, responds to, and elicits human emotions, is an emerging area that has great potential for advertising research and practice. Studies on the applicability of emotion AI in advertising and marketing have been growing in academic journals. This rapidly burgeoning scholarship creates a need for advertising scholars to comprehend the current status of the research on emotion AI in advertising as well as opportunities and challenges that this new technological development will bring to. Thus, this study aims to offer an overview of research on emotion AI in advertising to identify the scope of existing research, gaps in knowledge, and opportunities and challenges that lie ahead.

Following a series of major breakthroughs in artificial intelligence (AI) technology, it is believed that the use of AI technology can fundamentally subvert many industries and business fields, one of which is marketing. For instance, AI is likely to become a key driver of how advertising and marketing activities are conducted (Qin and Jiang, 2019) and thus dramatically change marketing strategies and customer behaviors (Davenport et al., 2020).