Bots vs. humans: how schema congruity, contingency-based interactivity, and sympathy influence consumer perceptions and patronage intentions

Artificial intelligence (AI) is rapidly reconstructing consumer experiences with brands in recent years. However, there have been the unsettled debates on whether humans react to robots (e.g., chatbots) in the same way as they do to other humans, and how the intrinsic strength of AI (i.e., autonomous processing and synthetization of information) and humans (i.e., emotional intelligence) factor in the human-AI interactions in brand communication...