Factors Predicting Consumer-AI Interactions

The involvement of Artificial intelligence (AI) in the everyday life of consumers has important implications on the way consumer and AI interact. AI and robots can have different roles in the interaction with consumers, from simple transactional exchange relationships to more complex empathetic ones. The present research focuses in finding the constructs that affect these consumer-AI relationships, by analyzing acceptance, trust, interaction quality, empathy, attachment, anthropomorphism, self-disclosing behavior, loyalty. Based on literature review, we focused on pointing out the factors that predict and affect consumerAI interactions. In the first part of the paper the role of trust was analyzed, while in the last part we focused in defining the way in which attachment and gender characteristics affect the relationship between consumer and AI. Our research shows that there are different types of relationships depending on the context, depending on trust, attachment, empathy, loyalty and gender characteristics. These results have important implications in the way robots and AI will be integrated in the shopping experience of consumer. Depending on the closeness of the relationship between consumer-AI, there will be different activities and roles that the AI will take over. For this reason, it is important to understand all facets of this relationship in order to implement it in an optimal way.