Professor Tom Chen

Professor Tom Chen is Professor of Marketing at Kent Business School, University of Kent. He has held senior academic and leadership roles in the UK and Australia, including serving as MBA Director at Kent Business School. He is Treasurer and Board member of AMA SERVSIG, initiator of Sharing Smart Cities and the Co-creation in Service and Customer Engagement (CCIS-CE) Symposium, and serves as an Associate Editor and Editorial Review Board member for long-established marketing and service journals. His international experience includes EU Horizon projects on digital and AI-enabled mental health platforms, with a strong focus on transdisciplinary collaboration across business, health and technology.

Professor Tom Chen’s research focuses on experience sharing, co-creation and engagement, and the concept of betterment in the era of AI. He is particularly interested in how experiences are created, shared, interpreted and mobilised, and how AI can augment these processes to support individual, organisational and societal betterment.

His work increasingly examines human-AI-human collaboration, reflexivity and the design of digital and AI-enabled platforms. A central feature of his research is transdisciplinary collaboration, bringing together perspectives from business, health, technology and public policy to address wicked problems and complex service and societal challenges. 

Professor Tom Chen teaches across undergraduate and postgraduate programmes, including Executive MBA education. His teaching interests include marketing strategy, customer experience management, customer relationship management, and AI leadership and decision-making. His teaching emphasises strategic thinking, customer-centricity and the effective use of AI in managerial judgement and organisational decision-making.

Professor Tom Chen welcomes PhD candidates interested in service and marketing research, particularly customer experience, customer co-creation engagement, human-AI-human collaboration, AI leadership and decision-making, digital and AI-enabled services, and the concept of experience sharing for betterment in the era of AI. He is also interested in transdisciplinary research spanning business, health and technology.

He has supervised doctoral research across service, customer experience, digital transformation and related marketing topics, and welcomes projects that combine strong theoretical development with meaningful managerial or societal relevance.