Exploring consumers response to text-based chatbots in e-commerce: The moderating role of task complexity and chatbot disclosure

Artificial intelligence based chatbots have brought unprecedented business potential. This study aims to explore consumers trust and response to a text-based chatbot in ecommerce, involving the moderating effects of task complexity and chatbot identity disclosure. A survey method with 299 useable responses was conducted in this research. This study adopted the ordinary least squares regression to test the hypotheses. First, the consumers perception of both the empathy and friendliness of the chatbot positively impacts their trust in it. Second, task complexity negatively moderates the relationship between friendliness and consumers trust. Third, disclosure of the text based chatbot negatively moderates the relationship between empathy and consumers trust, while it positively moderates the relationship between friendliness and consumers trust. Fourth, consumers trust in the chatbot increases their reliance on the chatbot and decreases their resistance to the chatbot in future interactions. Adopting the stimulus organism response framework, this study provides important insights on consumers perception and response to the text-based chatbot. The findings of this research also make suggestions that can increase consumers positive responses to text based chatbots. Extant studies have investigated the effects of automated bots attributes on consumers perceptions. However, the boundary conditions of these effects are largely ignored. This research is one of the first attempts to provide a deep understanding of consumers responses to a chatbot.

Evaluating if trust and personal information privacy concerns are barriers to using health insurance that explicitly utilizes AI

Trust and privacy have emerged as significant concerns in online transactions. Sharing information on health is especially sensitive but it is necessary for purchasing and utilizing health insurance. Evidence shows that consumers are increasingly comfortable with technology in place of humans, but the expanding use of AI potentially changes this. This research explores whether trust and privacy concern are barriers to the adoption of AI in health insurance. Two scenarios are compared: The first scenario has limited AI that is not in the interface and its presence is not explicitly revealed to the consumer. In the second scenario there is an AI interface and AI evaluation, and this is explicitly revealed to the consumer. The two scenarios were modeled and compared using SEM PLS-MGA. The findings show that trust is significantly lower in the second scenario where AI is visible. Privacy concerns are higher with AI but the difference is not statistically significant within the model.