Disembodied conversational agents, also known as chatbots, are becoming more prevalent in organizations as a supplement to human interaction. Many companies employ chatbots for live interaction with customers on websites, to automatically provide reminders about appointments, or handle back-end processing such as supply ordering. These programs are designed with user interfaces like a chat window and use natural language processing (NLP) and other human-like social cues.

We are interested in how individual factors (e.g., level of expertise), task-related factors (e.g., task complexity, nature of decision-making), and organizational/institutional factors (e.g., orientation to knowledge, privacy, and ethical concerns) impact professionals’ attitudes toward AI chatbots, including their level of trust and willingness to use them in decision-making.

To explore these questions, we will be using a mixed-methods study using an exploratory sequential design (Creswell & Plano Clark, 2018). Specifically, we have been conducting semi-structured interviews to answer our research questions, which will be followed by a survey instrument to test our hypotheses.

Blew are some preliminary findings based on the interviews we have conducted so far.