Disclose the Bot: Chatbot Disclosure and Anxiety in Customer–Chatbot Interactions

As artificial intelligence (AI) is rapidly gaining popularity, AI chatbot in customer service receives wide attention in the information systems (IS) domain. However, extant research underexplored the favorable impact of chatbot disclosure on customer evaluation of chatbots, products, and companies. This paper studies the interplay between chatbot disclosure and customer anxiety during the customer-chatbot interaction, as well as a moderated mediation model linking chatbot disclosure to perceived certainty or pre-interaction expectation and customer evaluation. An empirical study is designed to test the interaction effect with a real-world dataset E-commerce Dialogue Corpus by natural language processing (NLP) methods. In addition, an experimental study is designed to verify the proposed relationship. This paper is anticipated to explore the boundary conditions and underlying mechanisms of chatbot disclosure and customer evaluation. Besides, this paper provides implications for online shoppers to effectively adopt AI chatbots in dealing with customers’ negative emotions