Feeling grounded when watching live streaming shows of highly anthropomorphic interactive virtual influencers: An exploratory study on customer opinions
通过探索性访谈，研究了AI直播电商中虚拟主播如何让顾客产生“踏实感”，以及这种感受对购买动机的影响，挑战了虚拟主播缺乏真实感的传统观点。
Powered by generative artificial intelligence, AI live streaming commerce (ALSC) employs virtual influencers (VI) to promote products. Despite its novelty and hype, research on VIs remains limited. We adopt a novel groundedness theory to study customer engagement in ALSC. Through exploratory interviews, we find that customers can feel grounded in ALSC. Such feelings can be primarily affected by VI characteristics and customer characteristics, which can also affect customers’ purchase motivations. The findings contribute to the ALSC literature by examining the emotional motivations of groundedness in customers’ purchase decisions, in contrast to the existing cognitive focus. The findings also extend the groundedness theory by identifying new sources, contextualized antecedents, and dark sides of groundedness. Additionally, the findings contribute to the VI literature by demonstrating that VIs in ALSC can unexpectedly create engaging customer experiences, which contrasts with the existing notion that customers view VIs as inauthentic and less engaging.