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The widespread use of artificial intelligence (AI) technology in the hospitality industry has triggered concerns among frontline service employees about their future careers, namely, AI awareness. This study aims to explore whether AI awareness influences frontline service employees’ silence through psychological contract breach and whether this process is contingent on frontline service employees’ moral identity, drawing on social exchange theory and moral identity theory.

The data were collected from 355 frontline service employees in Chinese hotels using a two-wave survey. SPSS macro PROCESS Model 58 was used to test the proposed hypotheses.

AI awareness increases frontline service employees’ silence by prompting psychological contract breach. This process is moderated by frontline service employees’ moral identity. Specifically, moral identity mitigates the effect of psychological contract breach on silence.

Organizations and managers should pay attention to the impact of AI on frontline service employees and take measures to help them better adapt to the rapidly changing work environment. In particular, it helps reduce frontline service employees’ silence by fostering positive attitudes toward AI, maintaining their psychological contracts and developing their moral identities.

This study enriches the research on the outcomes of AI awareness by directing our attention to frontline service employees’ silence. Moreover, this study not only explores the responses to AI awareness that frontline service employees make as “economic persons” but also examine whether they, as “moral persons,” regulate their responses contingent on their moral identity under the impact of AI. Exploring frontline service employees’ dual identities helps bring this research closer to the realities of managerial practice, thereby contributing to a better understanding and management of their complex responses to AI shocks.

Intellectual experiences focus on users’ information processing and critical thinking toward stimuli. The deployment of humanoid service robots as novel stimuli in tourism and hospitality has influenced users’ perceptions and may affect their intellectual engagement. This paper aims to connect four contemporary theoretical concepts: the service robot acceptance model, technological fear, the uncanny valley theory and the stereotype content model, to investigate users’ perceptions and intellectual experiences toward humanoid service robots.

Scale development procedures were conducted: literature review, checking face and content validity, factorizing items and dimensions, achieving construct and criterion validity and testing predictive validity.

Through literature review and free-response tasks, 43 measurement items were generated. Next, 1,006 samples from two cross-cultural groups refined the scale. Finally, a reliable and valid scale with four dimensions measuring users’ perceptions of humanoid service robots was determined.

Humanoid service robots should be designed to enhance functionality and innovativeness while minimizing stiffness, inflexibility, unsafety and danger to improve users’ intellectual engagement.

This study provides a novel examination of users’ intellectual experiences toward humanoid service robots by connecting four contemporary theories of users’ perceptions. This study enriches human–robot experience through an integrated perspective and presents a rigorous examination of the scale’s psychometric properties. A reliable and valid scale for measuring users’ perceptions toward humanoid service robots fills the gaps and serves as an effective predictor of intellectual experience in human–robot literature.