Chatbots and digital transformation in Colombian banking: Drivers of continuance intention in an emerging market

This study investigates users’ continuance intention toward AI-powered chatbots in the Colombian banking sector, a setting characterized by institutional asymmetries, trust-related concerns around digital financial services, and the continued relevance of interpersonal service expectations. Drawing on a Global South perspective as an interpretive lens, this study examines chatbot continuance intention in an emerging-market banking context where digital service evaluation is shaped by usefulness, satisfaction, perceived quality, and trust. Rather than treating institutional conditions as directly measured mechanisms, the study uses the Colombian context to interpret how post-use service evaluations operate in a relational and highly regulated financial environment.Using Partial Least Squares Structural Equation Modeling (PLS-SEM), data from 439 Colombian banking users were analyzed to assess four antecedents of continuance intention: perceived chatbot quality, trust, satisfaction, and perceived usefulness. The findings show that satisfaction is the strongest predictor of continuance intention, followed by perceived usefulness, perceived chatbot quality, and trust. Specifically, satisfaction showed the strongest effect (β = 0.380), followed by perceived usefulness (β = 0.250), perceived chatbot quality (β = 0.150), and trust (β = 0.110). The model explained approximately 58.1% of the variance in continuance intention. These results suggest that, in the Colombian banking context, positive post-use evaluations play a particularly central role in continuance intention, even when trust in digital financial technologies remains more cautious or uneven.