Abstract
As the emergence of conversational AI agents (CAs)- are systems that simulate human conversation, utilizing channels such as speech, text, facial expressions, and gestures, such as Google Assistants and Alexa (Laranjo et al., 2018, p. 1248)—are ubiquitously growing, customer negativity and “the dark side” toward CAs on the rise. Such negativity can manifest in service encounters—including avoidance, non-adoption, and resistance of CAs (Lyngdoh et al., 2021; Sands et al., 2022; Subero-Navarro et al., 2022)—can result from interactions with CAs. Consequently, the complexities of this negativity and management strategies have attracted considerable attention(Wang et al., 2023). Yet, there is little guidance on how to prevent and /or mitigate customer negativity during interactions with CAs (Dootson et al., 2022; Oravec, 2023). Recent statistics revealed that 80 % of customers view interacting with chatbots for customer service as a source of increasing frustration (Westfall, 2022). Survey data from the Deloitte Centre for Technology demonstrated that 62% of consumers are still increasingly uncomfortable with CAs (Deloitte, 2023), contributing to a sluggish adoption rate of CAs (Longoni & Cian, 2022), which is projected to reach $107.3 billion in 2025 (Business Insider, 2022). While the challenges of customer negativity during interactions with CAs have grown for firms, limited research has focused on the dark side of customer-CAs interactions, particularly the triggers of customer negativity and possible management strategies to address these challenges (Grazzini et al., 2023; Kang et al., 2023; Oravec, 2023).