The rapid growth of artificial intelligence (AI) reflects its widespread adoption across various industries and occupations. Yet, much of the discourse still conceptualizes AI narrowly as a property of computational machinery. Within marketing and service scholarship, such mechanistic framings obscure the relational and systemic dimensions of intelligence that become salient in AI-enabled service interactions. Drawing on service-dominant (S-D) logic, this paper reconceptualizes intelligence as an emergent property of adaptive, self-organizing service ecosystems, foregrounding the systemic processes and relational configurations through which actors and their capacities take form. As intelligent technologies become increasingly entangled in service exchange, they render more visible and consequential the ongoing interactions through which human and non-human actors are co-constituted, underscoring the need for a clearer relational-ontological grounding of S-D logic. We conceptualize adaptation and intelligence as a generative duality: adaptation captures the adjustments enacted within a service ecosystem, whereas intelligence denotes the systemic capacity enabling those adjustments through feedback, learning, and institutional co-evolution. This perspective strengthens S-D logic’s relational foundations by showing that AI exemplifies—rather than disrupts—the emergent, relational processes through which service ecosystems coordinate, evolve, and create value.
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