Artificial or Intelligent: How AI Agents' Language Use affects Customer Satisfaction

• Author(s) / Creator(s)

  • Moore, Sarah G

• SSHRC IDG awarded 2022: This project seeks to test how language use influences customer perceptions of AI agents’ humanness and investigate when consumers prefer interacting with AI agents that are more or less human-like.This project will develop a framework to explain how, when, and why consumers are impacted by AI agents’ language use. Specifically, the team focuses on lexical diversity—the number of unique words in a text—as an indicator of AI agents’ humanness. The team argues that when AI agents use more diverse language, consumers will perceive them as more human­like. Further, they identify a novel variable that determines when consumers will respond positively or negatively to more human­like AI agents: consumers' stage in the decision journey (pre­transaction, transaction, post­transaction). They predict that because consumers have different goals at each stage, their preferences for AI agents’ humanness—and their responses to lexical diversity—will vary. They will test their framework across multiple experiments with consumers, using real chat bots and consequential choices.

• Date created

  2022-02-02

• Subjects / Keywords

  • Insight Development Grant
  • IDG
  • SSHRC
  • Marketing
  • Customer Service
  • Online Chat
  • Artificial Intelligence
  • Customer Satisfaction
  • Language
  • Sociolinguistics
  • Informatics
  • Communication
  • Management
  • Information
  • Technology
  • Technologies

• Type of Item

  Research Material

• DOI

  https://doi.org/10.7939/r3-241d-1c85

• License

  ©️Moore, Sarah G. All rights reserved other than by permission. This document embargoed to those without UAlberta CCID until 2026.