Smith Professors Make Sense of March Madness Marketing Trends and AI-Involvement in Bracket Building
Despite few upsets, the NCAA men’s and women’s tournaments remain compelling, with millions tracking brackets. One perfect bracket remains. Smith professors Henry C. Boyd III and Daniel McCarthy discuss AI, marketing trends, NIL and fan behavior.
How Doing Things Alone Can Curb Loneliness
Amid a growing loneliness epidemic, Smith professor Rebecca Ratner says individuals can build connections by engaging in activities alone and initiating interactions. Her research highlights the role of marketers in fostering community, deeper conversations and meaningful social connections.
Smith Students Create AI Bot for Public Good
A student-built AI chatbot to combat food insecurity won a UMD competition and national attention. Developed for Capital Area Food Bank, it helps users find nearby resources 24/7 in multiple languages and will be implemented by its creators as interns.
Three Strategic Bets on AI’s Future
This paper examines competition in the consumer AI assistant market using worldwide iOS and Android app-store data from seven major AI assistants from May 2023 through December 2025. Rather than finding a winner-take-all market, we show that major product launches tend to coincide with growth in the overall category, with little evidence of direct cannibalization across leading models. In other words, the “AI war” appears less zero-sum than commonly assumed.
Where GenAI Consumer Research is Likely Headed
Generative AI expands access to consumer research but risks biased, generic findings detached from real behavior, Roland Rust and Ming-Hui Huang say. They identify democratization, the “average trap” and model collapse as growing threats, urging human-centered methods to prevent synthetic, nonhuman results.
The Caring Machine: Feeling AI for Customer Care
Feeling skills have always been a human domain, but AI is advancing rapidly. This article shows how AI can be used to develop feeling intelligence and build empathetic customer relationships.
Smith Researcher Co Develops AdGazer, a Breakthrough for Predicting Attention to Digital Ads
AdGazer, co-developed by Michel Wedel at the University of Maryland’s Smith School, uses AI and eye-tracking data to predict ad attention. It outperforms leading vision models by analyzing ads and context to optimize placement and increase brand engagement.
Smith Among Early Movers Bringing Vibe Coding into the MBA Experience
AI-powered “vibe coding” is reshaping business education, enabling app development through natural language prompts. At the University of Maryland’s Smith School, marketing professor Wendy Moe taught MBA students to use AI tools to build near-launch-ready applications in fall 2025.
Smith’s P.K. Kannan Announced as 2026 AMA Fellow Inductee
P.K. Kannan, dean’s chair in marketing science at the University of Maryland’s Robert H. Smith School of Business, will be inducted into the 2026 American Marketing Association Fellows cohort, honoring his influential research, teaching and service at conference in Madrid.
The GenAI Future of Consumer Research
We develop a novel generative AI (GenAI) trajectory, “democratization-average trap-model collapse,” to identify data and model challenges posed by GenAI, from which we project the GenAI future of consumer research. This trajectory consists of three key phenomena: democratization broadens consumer participation, the average trap produces generic responses, and model collapses occurs when GenAI outputs lose human sensibilities.