Merchandising/Marketing/Retailing: Management

Can AI Match Human Experts? Consumer Evaluation of AI- vs. Human- Curated Products

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Abstract

While the advancement of Artificial Intelligence (AI) technology enabled the algorithms to effectively simulate human intelligence, people still believe some uniquely human characteristics exist and machines, even with the most advanced AI, would not perform as well (Longoni et al., 2019). One of the AI-driven business models is subscription box services, the business that curates and delivers a box of goods to consumers periodically (Baxter, 2015). To explore how consumers perceive and respond to these services, this study examined consumers’ perceptions of recommendations from AI with those from humans in the context of fashion and meal subscriptions. A 2(product: fashion vs. meal) × 2(recommender: human vs. AI) between-subjects online experiment (n=216, Amazon Mturk, Mage=39.82(11.14), Male 45.8%) revealed that the participants were more likely to accept the recommendations from a human because they perceived higher competence and warmth from the human recommender than AI. Furthermore, creativity perception was a critical factor because it explained the role of both competence and warmth. While we hypothesized that creativity is a factor to increase competence, our result suggests that perceived creativity also contributes to the feeling of warmth. Why our participants associated creativity with warmth is unclear and further research is necessary to validate and understand this finding. The results supported that warmth perception prevails for both fashion and meal recommendations and for both shopping goals, suggesting that consumers still seek human touch in these recommendations, and subscription services must consider emphasizing and incorporating human experts in the curation process. Our findings showed that whereas hedonically-oriented participants equally considered competence as an important reason for accepting recommendations across product categories, participants with utilitarian goals were significantly different in considering the competence of AI and human recommender. 

Keywords: Subscription services, AI, Creativity

How to Cite:

Im, H. & Lee, G., (2022) “Can AI Match Human Experts? Consumer Evaluation of AI- vs. Human- Curated Products”, International Textile and Apparel Association Annual Conference Proceedings 78(1). doi: https://doi.org/10.31274/itaa.13838