CONSUMER TRUST TOWARD AI CHATBOTS IN E-COMMERCE: A COMPREHENSIVE REVIEW OF DETERMINANTS, CHALLENGES, AND FUTURE DIRECTIONS

Abstract

The emergence of artificial intelligence (AI) chatbots has proven to be a game-changer within the e-commerce industry, as they improve customer interaction by providing real-time support, making product recommendations, and automating service. It has been established that with businesses more inclined towards adopting AI-driven conversational agents in their digital channels, customer trust in AI chatbots will have a huge bearing on their adoption and success in the long run. This review looks into a detailed analysis of consumer trust towards AI chatbots in the e-commerce environment by drawing from existing literature on factors, outcomes, issues, and areas of research on the subject. This review identifies important trust factors, such as perceived intelligence, usefulness, ease of use, transparency, personalization, reliability, human-likeness, and data security, and delves into the psychological aspects that influence trust formation, such as perceived risk, trust propensity, technology readiness, consumer innovativeness, perceived control, and emotional response. It is clear from the analysis that trust influences consumer satisfaction, engagement, purchase intentions, customer loyalty, and positive electronic word-of-mouth. AI chatbots face certain barriers, such as incorrect responses, a lack of empathy, privacy concerns, algorithmic bias, over-automation, and erosion of trust after service failure. Additionally, new trends like generative AI chatbots, LLMs, voice commerce, agentic AI shopping assistants, multimodal AI systems, and hyper-personalized shopping experiences are set to redefine the way digital commerce is practiced, while some research gaps need to be addressed, such as longitudinal studies, cross-cultural studies, ethical trust frameworks, human-AI collaboration models, trust repair, and explainable AI. The study emphasizes the development of transparent, secure, ethical, and customer-centric AI chatbot systems. It is a valuable contribution to the ongoing research in AI-enabled commerce.