Analytics and AI as exogenous cognition
Andrew Smith, Evgeniya Lukinova, J. Harvey, Gavin Smith, Roberto Mansilla, James Goulding, Georgiana Nica‐Avram · 2025
The chapter provides an introduction to the core concepts employed as organizing principles for subsequent chapters. ‘Exogenous cognition’ is introduced as a concept to account for the fact that a distributed system of consumer analytics (driven by machine learning and artificial intelligence (AI)) seeks to think on our behalf and acts as a complex of ‘cognitive prosthetics’ to assist and expedite purchase decisions. This leads to an exposition of ‘cognitive state theory’ (CST). The principal elements of CST are explained and discussed; ‘endogenous cognition’ describes situations in which choice and purchase decisions are accomplished without digital decision support; ‘symbiotic cognition’ describes the decision-making state when consumers employ AI and analytics-driven technology; and ‘surrogate cognition’ describes the ceding or delegation of decisions (or parts of a decision) to AI.