Introduction

The fast advancement of digital technologies such as artificial intelligence (AI) continues to have a substantial impact on retail and consumer services (Kai et al., 2020). AI-based chatbots are one area of increased interest in the application of AI for online shopping. These chatbots have been launched as digital assistants in online retail environments in order to improve customer experience and meet expectations through real-time conversations (Cheng et al., 2021). According to Business Insider (2020), the chatbot industry will increase at a pace of 29.7% each year, reaching $125 million by 2025. The predicted compound annual growth rate is 24.3%. (Pantano and Pizzi, 2020). 

According to a study of Facebook users, more than 70% see their encounters with chatbots as failures, indicating that there is still a great craving for human engagement (Ashfaq et al., 2020). Given these findings, it may be difficult for chatbots to totally replace people, with some predicting that human and AI-powered agents would need to collaborate to deliver superior services (Xiao and Kumar, 2021). Delegating service responsibilities and achieving a service balance between chatbot efficiency and human empathy is therefore a significant issue. We feel that major explanations are needed regarding how differences in the kind of service agent (chatbots vs. human humans) impact communication quality and, as a result, consumer impressions of the contact process.

The results of this research can help improve our understanding of the impact processes in human-computer interaction as well as the boundary conditions of human-computer interaction theory. The conclusions also have significant implications for e-commerce platforms, assisting them in making appropriate use of human-computer collaboration in service delivery and in better understanding the aspects impacting the acceptance of chatbots.

Chatbots against living beings

E-commerce platforms employ service agents for a variety of purposes, including strengthening the customer-brand connection, providing services and providing a pleasant customer experience, meeting consumer expectations, and creating value for the organization. Limitations and potential of research. 
The study focuses on the influence of service agent type on consumer adoption intention in the online retail business, and the conclusions are exclusively applicable to the retail industry. Further research is needed to confirm the findings before they can be applied to other sectors. This will increase the generalizability of the findings. The majority of the chatbots utilized in the study are text-based, and human-like robots are becoming more popular.