When AI-based services fail: examining the effect of the self-AI connection on willingness to share negative word-of-mouth after service failures

ABSTRACT

Recent proliferation of artificial intelligence (AI) in service encounters gives rise to questions on how consumers respond to these novel technologies. This study seeks to examine the influence of AI service failures on consumers’ propensity to share negative word-of-mouth. Three experiments demonstrate that consumers are less willing to share negative word-of-mouth after a service failure caused by an AI recommendation system, in contrast to a human employee, despite there being no difference in the failure, firm blame, or dissatisfaction with the failure. Further investigation suggests that this effect is driven by consumers’ perceived connection with the AI that uses their past behavior to predict their future preferences. The conclusions shed light on the overall understanding of consumer-AI interactions. The results also provide managerial implications for firms to implement AI effectively and carefully in their service offerings.

摘要

人工智能（AI）在 服务遭遇中的最新普及引发了有关消费者如何响应这些新颖技术的问题。这项研究旨在研究AI服务失败对消费者分享负面口碑的倾向的影响。三个 实验表明，与人工员工相比，由AI推荐系统导致的服务失败后，消费者更不愿意分享负面的口碑，尽管失败本身，对企业的责怪或对服务的不满没有 差异。进一步的调查表明，这种影响是由消费者与AI的自我概念联结所驱动的，因为该AI使用他们过去的行为来预测他们的未来偏好。结论为对消 费者与AI交互的整体理解提供了启示。同时，还为企业有效和谨慎地在其服务产品中实施AI提供了管理上的启示。

KEYWORDS:

• Artificial intelligence
• service failure
• negative world-of-mouth
• self-enhancement
• attribution

关键词:

• 人工智能
• 服务失败
• 负面口碑
• 自我增强
• 归因

Acknowledgements

The authors would like to thank Yany Grégoire as well as Carlos Flavian and all of the participants at the AIRSI2019 conference at the University of Zaragoza for providing helpful comments that strengthened this manuscript. Correspondence about this article should be addressed to the first author.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).