Ethical Challenges of AI Agents in Marketing: A Systematic Literature Review

This article presents a systematic literature review on the ethical challenges posed by artificial intelligence (AI) agents in marketing, with a focus on systemic biases such as racial discrimination. The review identifies significant gaps in scholarship, including limited regional scope and a lack of long-term impact assessment. Based on these findings, we propose recommendations for future research. Thirty peer-reviewed studies were selected through a structured search of Moodle and Google Scholar platforms, using keywords such as ‘marketing’, ‘artificial intelligence customer service’, ‘ethics’, and ‘bias.’ The findings are organised into three themes: racial discrimination mechanisms (analysing the exclusionary impact of algorithmic bias on minorities), gender design and discrimination (examining the ways in which anthropomorphic technology reinforces social stereotypes), and ageism (explaining the digital divide caused by the lack of aging-friendly technology). Each theme is critically evaluated to illuminate mechanisms of bias and their multidimensional impacts. The introduction describes the current prevalence of artificial intelligence agents in marketing scenarios, reveals their unethical behaviour, such as the negative social impact and user rights infringement caused by discriminatory algorithmic decision-making, and points out the shortcomings of the current regulatory framework. The review concludes by recommending the development of cross-cultural ethics assessment tools and long-term bias tracking models.