Facing artificial intelligence from simple product recommendations to complete lifestyle design

Abstract

The late expeditious development of Artificial Intelligence (AI) contains both appreciations and concerns in regard of its potential. Nevertheless, despite all its technological potential, its future also depends on how much people will acknowledge it. This study takes a marketing perspective and presents a contribution by offering answers, explanations and predictions regarding AI acceptance in consumption domain. The study investigates insights of consumers' AI acceptance by taking a well known and familiar AI application as an example, recommendations at online shopping. With the help of a unifying methodology including an experiment and a survey, AI acceptance is challenged at a comparison to a Human advisor together with the presentations of the reasons behind, and a future projection. Results indicate that in such a challenge AI is behind a Human advisor. AI is attributed with lower trust, both at cognitive and emotional dimensions. In addition, in adopting the recommendation, whereas for Human advisor emotional trust is as crucial as cognitive trust, for AI condition emotional trust becomes insignificant. In terms of functionality, the recommendation received from AI is perceived as being less useful, and the process of receiving the recommendation is evaluated as less transparent. Lastly, results regarding an enhanced AI competence, mimicking a projection of the future, showed that the differentiation between AI and Human advisors observed at previous steps remain consistent.