Secondary Mental Models: Introducing Conversational Agents in Financial Advisory Service Encounters

When introducing unfamiliar Artificial Intelligence (AI)-based systems, such as conversational agents (CAs), one needs to ensure that users interact with them according to their design. While past research has studied single-user environments, many practical settings involve multiple parties. This study addresses this gap and focuses on financial advisory service encounters and how mental models evolve in multi-party contexts. A multimodal interactive CA is developed and tested in financial consultations with 24 clients. The observations of these consultations and subsequent interviews provide insights into the challenges of using CAs in unfamiliar contexts. The clients have difficulties effectively using the system. This is linked to the institutional setting of financial advisory service encounters and a mismatch between the designer’s conceptual model and the client’s mental model, which we call secondary mental model