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About

Angela Roth is a researcher whose work sits at the intersection of service innovation, retail technology, and human-robot interaction. Her scholarship focuses primarily on how service robots are transforming the frontline dynamics of stationary retail environments — an increasingly critical area of inquiry as physical retailers face mounting pressure from e-commerce competition and evolving customer expectations. Roth's most influential contribution, her 2020 exploratory interview study on frontline employees' acceptance of and resistance to service robots in stationary retail, has garnered 53 citations, establishing her as a notable voice in this emerging field. This work shed light on the human dimensions of technological adoption, examining not only enthusiasm but also the anxieties and reservations that service staff bring to robot-integrated workplaces. Her complementary mixed-methods study from the same year extended this inquiry to the customer perspective, exploring how consumers themselves navigate encounters with robotic service agents. By 2022, Roth broadened her lens further, investigating retail managers' perspectives on organizational frontline robotics, adding a leadership and strategic dimension to her research portfolio. Together, her publications form a cohesive body of work that captures the multi-stakeholder complexity of service robot deployment, making her scholarship essential reading for researchers and practitioners interested in the future of retail and service management.