Abstract: Firms have increasingly adopted service agents on their websites to provide services to website users. Despite the increasing penetration of different types of service agents, little knowledge exists on how website users respond to the mere exposure to service agents and, most important, on how they respond to artificial intelligence (AI)-based as compared to human-based service agents. Drawing on cue utilization theory, this study shows for the first time that the mere exposure to AI-based service agents (as compared to an exposure to human-based service agents) can prompt website users to disclose more personal information to the website provider. This is because website users employ information about available service agents as a cue to make inferences about the website provider. In specific, the perceived intrusiveness of the website provider is lower when website users have been exposed to an AI-based versus a human-based service agent. The additional findings about the boundary conditions of these effects can be used to derive practical implications.
Short CV: Dominik Siemon is an Associate Professor in the Department of Software Engineering in the School of Engineering Science at LUT University, Finland. In addition, he holds the title of Docent for Intelligent Information Systems at LUT University. He received his PhD (Dr. rer. pol.) in Business Information Systems from the Braunschweig University of Technology in Germany. His research interests include human-AI collaboration and interaction, conversational agents, intelligent systems, collaboration technology, creativity, and design science. His research has been presented at international conferences such as the International Conference on Information Systems and has been published in journals at the intersection of information systems and human-computer interaction, such as Information Systems Frontiers, Behaviour & Information Technology, Human-Computer Interaction and the Communications of the Association for Information Systems.
