Generative voice agents already handle substantive service conversations, hand customers over to human employees, and produce content that reaches large professional audiences — yet most of the design decisions behind them are still made by intuition. The Center for AI Value, part of the Technology Marketing Group, is recruiting a doctoral researcher to change that.The position is built around three projects, each carried out with an industry partner:
- Prompt granularity in AI voice agents — how tightly a firm should prescribe what its agent says, from laboratory experiments with live voice interaction through to a field experiment in the call operations of an insurance partner.
- Emotional grounding in AI-to-human handovers — whether the emotional acknowledgement offered by an AI carries over when the conversation is passed to a human colleague, and how that shapes whether customers feel heard.
- Multimodal prediction of marketing content performance — benchmarking text and image embeddings as inputs to models that predict engagement before a post is published.
We are looking for candidates with an MSc, MA or MPhil in business administration, computer science or a related field, strong empirical foundations, and a motivation to work on managerial and behavioural questions. Applicants should currently reside in Europe (no exemptions). The doctoral researcher will receive close scientific guidance from PD Dr. Sebastian Tillmanns and Dr. Joseph Ollier and will be embedded in the Technology Marketing Group led by Prof. Florian von Wangenheim.
The starting date is flexible and applications are accepted until the position is filled. Applications are only accepted through the online portal.
Full job advertisement and application
Questions about the position: Sebastian Tillmanns, stillmanns@ethz.ch (no applications).