Kathleen J. Kennedy, DBA, PhD
McClelland Park Room 425B
650 N Park Ave
Tucson, Arizona 85721-0078
Dr. Kennedy works at the intersection of human potential, technology, and value creation. Her research examines how value is generated when humans and increasingly capable systems work together — in consumer markets, in services, and in higher education — and what conditions allow that value to be realized rather than left on the table. At the University of Arizona she is a CUES Distinguished Fellow and a Community-Engaged Learning Fellow, and she leads the Norton School's work on AI literacy, human-AI collaborative pedagogy, and retail-technology research.
Her AI work began in the 1990s with marketing automation and neural networks, continued through e-commerce demand and pricing optimization models in retail and financial services, and since 2019 has focused on adaptive AI, cognitive tutoring systems, and the human-AI partnership patterns now reshaping work and learning. She built SCRIPT, a FERPA-compliant AI-augmented learning management system that uses course-level knowledge mapping and open-weight models to support instructors and students. Since 2022 she has trained over 2,000 faculty and instructional professionals in AI literacy, teaches a graduate course in AI Literacies, and trains graduate students and researchers in advanced AI research methods across six colleges. She runs managerial AI workshops where the gap between AI's actual capability and how professionals are using it is visible in every cohort.
Dr. Kennedy's industry career spans more than twenty-five years in C-level marketing, customer insight, and e-commerce roles at Fortune 500 retailers (Office Depot, OfficeMax), financial services firms, and global agency settings (OgilvyOne, the digital and direct marketing division of WPP/Ogilvy & Mather). She co-founded four marketing services businesses, including MindNav LLC, a research firm that pioneered consumer neuroscience research, healthcare and patient relationship management, and customer experience applications. She has served as Executive Director of the Center for Innovative Entrepreneurship and Research Director of the Suarez Applied Marketing Research Laboratories at The University of Akron, where she also held a Marketing faculty appointment from 2011 to 2017.
Education
- Doctor of Business Administration (DBA), Management Sciences and Marketing Division, Alliance Manchester Business School, University of Manchester (UK), 2024
- PhD, Higher Education Policy, with minors in Instruction and Assessment and Teaching and Learning Sociology, University of Arizona, 2026
- MBA, University of Miami, FL, 2004
Kathleen lives and works in Tucson, Arizona, USA.
Dr. Kennedy's current research program examines human-AI partnership across two interconnected domains: AI in consumer markets, services, and customer experience; and AI in teaching, learning, and faculty development. A through-line across both is the question of how human-AI collaboration generates value that pure automation cannot — and what frameworks, competencies, and conditions enable that value to be realized.In the consumer-markets domain, she has led a multi-year program of research on AI-assisted value co-creation, parasocial dynamics between consumers and AI systems, the personalization-privacy paradox, and the taxonomy of consumer-AI interaction. In the higher education domain, she has developed the Human-AI Literacies (HAL) framework, the AI Learning Adaptive Network (ALAN) model, the PALS personalized adaptive learning study (one of the most comprehensive controlled studies of AI adaptive learning in higher education), and an AI competencies taxonomy built from BLS, O*NET, and web job posting data.
RCSC Strategy Capstone, AI and Retailing, Digital Retailing, Social Media, Retail Innovation, Services Retailing, Customer Experience Management, Retail Business Analysis, Consumers and Sustainability, AI Literacies.
Human-AI collaboration and partnership; AI literacies and competency frameworks; consumer-AI interaction; retail and services technology; AI-assisted value co-creation; AI in higher education; marketing strategy and customer insight; mixed-methods research design; large-scale document and discourse analysis; consumer neuroscience.
Kennedy, K. J., He, H., & Sarantopoulos, P. (2026). "Shopper AI: Integrating Capabilities and Parasocial Skills." Journal of Service Research.
Kennedy, K. J. (2026). "The Promise and Challenge of AI Personalisation in Education: A Theoretical and Empirical Analysis." In Shaping Tomorrow: The Human Journey with AI.
Kennedy, K. J., & Castek, J. M. (2025). "Empowering ELA Teachers: Recommendations for Teacher Education in the AI Era." Contemporary Issues in Technology and Teacher Education (CITE Journal).
Kennedy, K. J., & Gupta, A. (2025). "AI Education Roadmap: A framework for scaffolding AI and data literacy teaching and learning." Thresholds in Education.
Kennedy, K. J. (2024). "Chapter 8: Portfolios." In M. G. Strawser & R. Yaure (Eds.), Interdisciplinary Approaches to Culminating Student Experiences. Vernon Press.
Kennedy, K. (2020). "Retail Digitalization: Two Emerging Retail Models." International Journal of Retail Distribution and Management. (Best paper by solo author, ACRA Conference 2019.)
Daugherty, T., Hoffman, E., Kennedy, K., & Nolan, M. (2018). "Measuring consumer neural activation to differentiate cognitive processing of advertising: Revisiting Krugman." European Journal of Marketing, 52(1/2), 182–198.
Daugherty, T., Hoffman, E., & Kennedy, K. (2016). "Research in reverse: Ad testing using an inductive consumer neuroscience approach." Journal of Business Research, 69(8), 3168–3176.
McCarthey, K., & Kennedy, K. (2005). The Economic Value of Innovative Entrepreneurship. Kauffman Foundation.
Selected Presentations
Kennedy, K. J. (2026). "Mapping Student-AI Learning Journeys." Workshop, ITLC Lilly Conference, San Diego, January.
Kennedy, K. J. (2025). "Bridging the AI Literacy Gap: An Integrated Framework for Human-AI Literacies." AI Insights presentation, University of Arizona, October 1.
Kennedy, K. J. (2025). "Transforming Learning Through Guided AI Collaboration." ITLC Lilly Conference, Asheville, NC, August 5.
Kennedy, K. J. (2024). "Increasing Higher Education Access and Equity with PALS AI-Personalized Learning." ITLC Lilly Conference, Asheville, NC, August 5.
Kennedy, K. J. (2022). "Intelligent Shopping Agents (ISAs): Opportunities and implications of Alexa, Google Assistant, and other non-human shoppers." Doctoral Fortnight Conference, University of Manchester.
Kennedy, K. J. (2021). "AI servicescapes: Services innovation through customer-facing intelligent systems." Doctoral Fortnight Conference, University of Manchester.