Artificial intelligence in sales research: Identifying emergent themes and looking forward

The rapid advancement of artificial intelligence (AI) in sales lends promising grounds for sales practice and academic research. Using a two-study, multi-method approach to examining the literature, this study provides a detailed overview of the current position of AI in sales research. We consider how AI is studied as a substantive topic and how it is used as an analytical tool to study sales phenomena. Study 1 uses bibliometric analysis to provide a "horizontal" view of the literature by uncovering the network characteristics and structure. Study 2 uses topic modeling based on Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA)-a machine learning (ML) approach-to offer a "vertical" view of the literature by plunging into the contents of each article to reveal five important themes that characterize the state of the literature. We also offer a future research agenda to guide more studies that integrate AI and sales.