Service Design Creating Value for Industrial Corporates through AI Proofs of Concept

The field of service design has set practices that are useful during servitization transformations intended to help businesses respond to customers’ rising expectations regarding the value of the service experience itself. As businesses increasingly pursue service development alongside product development, they need new ways of working and of evaluating solutions. Simultaneously, technological advances open avenues to new services and ways of interacting with customers. This paper draws on two workshop case studies of artificial intelligence (AI) assistant projects to examine service design in the industrial context. Through these case studies, the paper illustrates how proof of concept (PoC) is used at different project stages and explores how service design can support creation of PoCs in large industrial corporate contexts. The findings reveal the aspects of PoC as embodied experiencing of intangible AI concepts, the creation of PoCs through conversations, and the role of PoCs in industrial service design process.