Based on the Emotion-As-Social-Information theory, this study explores the effects of service AI’s explicit and implicit emotional cues on customer satisfaction through four online scenario-based experiments. The findings reveal that explicit emotional cues from service AI positively influence customer satisfaction. Implicit emotional cues of service AI moderate the relationship between explicit emotional cues and customer satisfaction. Specifically, when service AI presents positive (vs. neutral) implicit emotional cues, the positive (vs. neutral) explicit emotional cues more effectively enhance customer satisfaction. The above effects are achieved through customers’ different emotional expectancy violation and perceived pleasure towards service AI Customers’ goal orientation moderates the impact of implicit and explicit emotional cues on perceived pleasure.