Karolien Poels is a full professor of Strategic Communication and Persuasive Technologies at the University of Antwerp, Belgium. She studies how strategic communication can address complex societal challenges through emotion-driven and technology-mediated processes.  Chatbots have been part of this work, for example in the context of vaccination and social support. Another line of research involves chatbots as an advertising vehicle, focusing on a user-centric the monetization of  genAI platforms and conversational AI