Introduction
Artificial intelligence, telework, digital marketing ecosystems, and cyberpsychology are reshaping the ways organizations attract, engage, serve, and retain customers (Davenport et al., 2024; Huang & Rust, 2023). Sales and marketing practices that were once organized around geographic territories, face-to-face relationship building, travel-intensive engagement, and relatively stable customer touchpoints are increasingly being replaced by digitally mediated, data-driven, and distributed systems (Verhoef et al., 2023; Wedel et al., 2023). These changes have expanded organizational reach and improved the speed of customer interaction, but they have also raised complex questions about trust, authenticity, professional judgment, customer inclusion, and technological dependence (Bleier et al., 2023).
This edited volume examines the evolving relationship among sales, marketing, customer relationship management, and client engagement in an era defined by AI-enabled decision support, remote interaction, intelligent platforms, and uneven digital readiness (Davenport et al., 2024). A central premise of the book is that the historical boundary between traditional sales and marketing is becoming less distinct (Huang & Rust, 2023). Marketing now extends across the customer lifecycle through predictive analytics, personalization engines, AI engagement, automated communication systems, and real-time data flows (Wedel et al., 2023). Sales functions, in turn, are becoming more consultative, more data-informed, and increasingly shaped by AI-driven insights that influence targeting, timing, messaging, and relationship development (Singh et al., 2023).
Yet this transformation is neither only technical nor operational. It is also psychological. Trust, credibility, rapport, persuasion, and customer confidence are now frequently established through screens, asynchronous communication, automated workflows, AI-generated messages, and digitally constructed professional identities (Bleier et al., 2023). These conditions require renewed scholarly attention, a new body of curated knowledge, regarding how customers and professionals interpret human and machine interaction in commercial settings (Huang & Rust, 2023). Contributors to this volume are invited to examine how organizations can use AI, digital platforms, and remote engagement tools effectively while preserving human judgment, ethical responsibility, and relational depth.
The book also provides proactive insight into the digital divide, which is a central concern in modern sales and marketing practice. Digital transformation may expand access for some customers while excluding or marginalizing others who lack reliable infrastructure, digital literacy, platform confidence, or psychological readiness to engage with automated systems (Robinson et al., 2023; van Dijk, 2023). In this sense, not all customers, employees, or communities experience digital engagement equally. This volume seeks contributions that critically examine both the opportunities and the constraints created by AI, telework, digital psychology, CRM transformation, and the changing nature of customer-facing work.