Activities, Projects and Events

Students often express dissatisfaction with feedback being received “too late to be useful”, highlighting a significant challenge in the assessment and feedback cycles within higher education. A possible AI-based solution to this will now be investigated following a successful bid for funding to the British Academy / Leverhulme by Dr Rodrigo Perez-Vega, Professor Adrian Palmer and Dr Yang Ding. The funding will allow a pioneering AI-enabled tool powered by custom Large Language Models to assess participating students’ work and provide formative and summative feedback. An experiment will compare feedback quality from the tool against instructor-led feedback, as evaluated by an expert panel and the students themselves. Ethical concerns will be mitigated through informed consent and ensuring the project runs in parallel with formal assessment arrangements. The study will begin in Spring 2025 with interim findings later in 2025 and final results expected in 2026.

The 3^rd annual Henley Business School – Chartered Institute of Marketing conference will take place on Wednesday 8^th October 2025 at the Greenlands campus. The focus this year will be the role of marketing leadership in the emerging era of AI to better anticipate and respond to consumers’ changing needs. changing needs. Further details and booking are available here.

The Consumer Futures Lab participated in the Henley Business School World of Work Regatta Conference, "Leadership Futures: Rewriting the Rules for Industry 5.0." on 3rd July. As part of the conference, Dr. Echo Feng, along with colleagues Kamila Miller, Nasim, and Niloo, demonstrated how AI tools—such as virtual reality and social robots—can assist in service innovation and future scenario research. Their demonstration highlighted the transformative potential of these technologies in joint academic-commercial projects, where interdisciplinary teams collaborate to prototype and refine human-centric solutions. By integrating cutting-edge tools with real-world industry challenges, they showcased how immersive technologies can accelerate the development of next-generation innovations—blending AI’s capabilities with the nuance of human-like interaction to shape Industry 5.0.

Dr Rodrigo Perez-Vega from the Consumer Futures Lab team delivered a talk on 26th March 2025 at the Intelligent Automation Systems Lab on social robots and assisted living and will also share insights from the work done with the Cost Action GoodBrother.

Dr Rodrigo Perez-Vega, along with Professor Adrian Palmer and Alex Scher-Smith from the Consumer Future Lab, presented their research on using social robots in an Elderly Care Ward at the Royal Berkshire Hospital. Their work explores the perceptions of healthcare professionals towards this type of technology, and identifies barriers and enablers of staff adoption. This research is a key step toward testing these robots in more complex hospital settings and with end users. The project also highlights ongoing collaboration with industry partner Service Robotics and the Royal Berkshire Hospital Trust on this project.

Henley Business School academics and members of Consumer Futures Lab, Dr Rodrigo Perez-Vega , Dr Irene Garnelo-Gomez and Ilaria Mazzoli presented their work at the World Social Marketing Conference in Cali, Colombia in November 2023.
The research examines the influencer campaign #deinfluencing and the different framing strategies used amongst influencers that took part in this study.

Supported by a grant from the Academy of Marketing, Consumer Futures Lab members, Dr Rodrigo Perez-Vega and Dr Fabio Goncalves de Oliveira engaged with Gen Z consumers to understand how VR can help develop simulations that can improve different soft skills.