With the rapid development of artificial intelligence, jobs are at risk of being replaced by automation. This phenomenon can mainly be found in routine tasks (Autor, 2015a; Huang & Rust, 2018; Morgenstem, 2016). Decreasing cost in implementing new technology leads to approximately 50 percent of job displacement in the U.S. labor market within the next one to two decades (Frey & Osborne, 2013; Mckinsey Global Institute, 2017; World Bank, 2016). Nowadays, a large number of technology implementation cases can be seen in the retail industry across the world. Possible job lost in service employees raised a concern by economists. In order to face this challenge, this thesis explored the advanced technology implementation with several retailers, focusing on Taiwanese 7-Eleven. By incorporating the concept of Service Dominant Logic and Service Ecosystem (Vargo & Lusch, 2016), the value in both service employees and technologies are addressed and compared. With a better understanding of the technology implementation ecosystem, this study provides an opportunity of balancing service employees and advanced technology in the front-end retail stores to bring out preferable service delivery.

Keywords: Advanced technology, technology implementation, smart retail, service employees, Service Dominant Logic, Service Ecosystem