What Drives Consumers’ Decisions to Use Intelligent Agent Technologies? A Systematic Review

As artificial intelligence continues to advance, it will increasingly empower the successful use of intelligent agent (IA) technologies in marketing practices. The purpose of this paper is to summarize the state-of-the-art literature and present a holistic view of different types of antecedents of IA technology use in marketing from the consumer’s perspective. This paper uses the systematic literature review method and covers 107 articles published in scientific journals between 2000 and 2020. The identified antecedents are categorized into IA characteristics, consumer perceptions, external conditions, as well as individual characteristics and analyzed at the individual level of use. Future research should focus on investigating the relative importance of the effects of IA characteristics, consumer perceptions, external, and individual factors on consumers’ intentions to use IAs. This paper argues that while extant technology acceptance models contribute to the understanding of IA use, IAs, due to their unique characteristics (e.g., anthropomorphism) and dimensions (e.g., IA as an interface, as a proxy for the system and an autonomous aggregator and agent), require a new lens to explain the drivers of IA use in data-rich and process-rich environments. The traditional technology acceptance theories provide a valuable, yet incomplete understanding of how consumers use IAs. Drawing from representation theory, this paper proposes a theoretical framework of IA use and argues that IAs act as representations to facilitate the primary goal.