Luxury fashion brands’ AI-powered sustainability chatbot communication: how information qualities and brand luxury perception shape consumer trust and behavior

This study examines how sustainability communication in luxury retail shapes brand trust and behavioral intentions, focusing on consumers' post-exposure perceptions of information quality and provider type. Building on perceived objectivity and perceived persuasiveness, the study explores how consumers evaluate identical sustainability information attributed to either a human agent or an artificial intelligence (AI) chatbot, and how these perceptions influence brand trust, information acceptance intention, and purchase intention. A scenario-based experiment with 346 participants was conducted, and the data were analyzed using PLS-SEM. Perceived objectivity and perceived persuasiveness were positively associated with brand trust, which inturn mediated their relationships with information acceptance intention and purchase intention. The indirect effect of perceived objectivity was significant only under AI communication, suggesting that algorithmic provider cues may strengthen the trust-mediated role of objectivity, whereas perceived persuasiveness remained consistently associated with trust and behavioral intentions across provider types. Subgroup analyses further suggest a conditional pattern: among consumers with lower perceived brand luxury, the links between brand trust and behavioral intentions were stronger under AI communication, whereas no significant provider differences emerged among those with higher perceived brand luxury. As these results derivefrom split-sample multi-group comparisons rather than a formal interaction test, they should be regarded as subgroup-based evidence. These findings extend luxury branding research by showing how AI provider cues shape perceived information quality in sustainability communication and by highlighting the need to align provider strategy with consumers' perceptions of luxury brands.