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Chatbots, one of the widely used artificial intelligence technologies, have become an integral part of e-commerce user conversations (Balakrishnan & Dwivedi, 2021b). Numerous companies have built chatbots and used them as their preferred channel of interaction and communication with consumers. For example, Apple's “Siri”, Baidu's “Xiaodu”, Xiaomi's “Xiao Ai”, Alibaba's “My Honey” and Telegram's embedded chatbots, have been used in many fields for a wide range of purposes. The existence of AI chatbots can be divided into virtual presence and physical entities. Virtual presence chatbots can be further divided into task-oriented chatbots and non-task-oriented chatbots. AI chatbot input can be not only natural language (text, voice, or both), but in the future, facial expressions, body movements, etc (Figure 1). AI chatbots will respond like real people, output conversations, or execute commands (Liew & Tan, 2021; Mudofi & Yuspin, 2022).
Figure 1. Classification of AI chatbots
However, do consumers like being served by AI Chatbots? The answer is contradictory (Choi & Drumwright, 2021; Mikalef et al.,2022). On the one hand, many consumers believe that AI simplifies operations and improves service efficiency (Kaplan & Haenlein, 2019); on the other hand, many consumers also resent being served by AI Chatbots, believing that human can better understand their needs (Arm Treasure Data, 2019). Why do consumers sometimes accept Chatbot services, and sometimes resent them? Is Chatbot technology not “smart” enough, or do consumers have a bias against Chatbots? This is an increasingly important theoretical and practical question that needs to be answered in current service management.
It is important to acknowledge that the current technology of AI Chatbots is far from mature, which is a major reason why consumers are reluctant to encounter Chatbots in most services (Wei et al., 2022). However, several studies have pointed out that even if chatbots perform as well as humans, consumers may still dislike the services from chatbots. For example, Luo et al. (2019) found that when the identity of an AI chatbot is revealed during sales via telephone, the success rate of the sale is significantly lower than that of human customer service. Castelo et al. (2019) argue that consumers are reluctant to adopt AI chatbots not because AI chatbot technology is not mature enough, but because of some psychological issues. Consumers who refuse to use chatbots prefer to engage with real people, fearing that chatbots will make mistakes and have limited functionality and answers, cannot “chat” in a friendly manner, lack empathy, and that private data may be compromised and used illegally (Van et al., 2019).
So what factors drive consumer attitudes toward AI services? This is not only a question of AI technology, but also a question of consumer psychology and social aspects.
The authors argue that consumer trust in AI chatbots is one of the most important factors driving consumer acceptance of AI chatbot services in areas such as e-commerce and customer service. This paper will explore the essential reasons why consumers trust AI chatbots and the key factors for understanding consumer trust in AI chatbots. Although the above issues have been covered and discussed in the existing literature, they are more often studied from a single dimension (Go & Sundar, 2019; Chen JS et al., 2021). However, consumers' trust in chatbots is the result of multiple factors and is a complex multidimensional problem. A reliable study should integrate all dimensions for systematic analysis.