{"id":3309,"date":"2025-07-01T13:02:34","date_gmt":"2025-07-01T13:02:34","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/musictechohio.online\/site\/customers-see-ai-research\/"},"modified":"2025-07-01T13:02:34","modified_gmt":"2025-07-01T13:02:34","slug":"customers-see-ai-research","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/musictechohio.online\/site\/customers-see-ai-research\/","title":{"rendered":"Something Hilarious Happens When Potential Customers See That a Product Has AI Features"},"content":{"rendered":"<div>\n<div><img loading=\"lazy\" width=\"2400\" height=\"1260\" src=\"https:\/\/wordpress-assets.futurism.com\/2025\/06\/customers-see-ai-research-1.jpg\" class=\"attachment-full size-full wp-post-image\" alt=\"New research explores how customers react to products that are marketed as having AI \u2014 with striking results.\" style=\"margin-bottom: 15px;\" decoding=\"async\"><\/div>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">New research suggests that slapping the &#8220;AI&#8221; label on products doesn&#8217;t always go over well with buyers, the <\/span><a href=\"https:\/\/www.wsj.com\/tech\/ai\/ai-advertising-consumer-trust-dc1a1425\"><i><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Wall Street Journal <\/span><\/i><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">reports<\/span><\/a><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">A <\/span><a href=\"https:\/\/www.tandfonline.com\/doi\/full\/10.1080\/19368623.2024.2368040#d1e1096\"><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">new study<\/span><\/a><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\"> published this month in <\/span><i><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Journal of Hospitality Marketing &amp; Management <\/span><\/i><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">found that consumers tended to turn <em>away<\/em> from products that were promoted as having AI \u2014 especially if the items were a high-risk purchase like a car.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">&#8220;When we were thinking about this project, we thought that AI will improve [consumers&#8217; willingness to buy] because everyone is promoting AI in their products,&#8221; coauthor Dogan Gursoy, a regents professor of hospitality business management at Washington State University, told the <\/span><i><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">WSJ<\/span><\/i><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">. &#8220;But apparently it has a negative effect, not a positive one.&#8221;<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Gursoy and his colleagues conducted their research by <\/span><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">recruiting two groups of around 100 participants each. O<\/span><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">ne group was shown fictional ads that included terms like &#8220;AI-powered,&#8221; while the other group saw ads that had more generic terms like &#8220;equipped with cutting-edge technologies.&#8221;\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">The results were counterintuitive, at least if you&#8217;ve been watching the tech industry stuff AI into every existing product over the past few years. Why? Because\u00a0the participants <\/span><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">who saw ads with AI-related marketing were less likely to try or buy the products they saw.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">But if you think more deeply, that <\/span><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">shouldn&#8217;t be too surprising. &#8220;AI&#8221; is more a marketing buzzword than it is an accurate descriptor of some sentient-seeming tech, and companies have shown that they&#8217;re <\/span><a href=\"https:\/\/futurism.com\/the-byte\/drive-thru-ai-humans\"><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">more than willing<\/span><\/a><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\"> to construe anything with a half-baked algorithm in it as being on the cusp of this wave of bleeding edge technology. (One favorite example: a &#8220;smart,&#8221; &#8220;AI-powered&#8221; <\/span><a href=\"https:\/\/futurism.com\/the-byte\/ai-powered-spice-dispenser-dorks\"><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">spice dispenser<\/span><\/a><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">.)<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Meanwhile, even Silicon Valley&#8217;s cr\u00e8me de la cr\u00e8me AI chatbots are still highly experimental and prone to <a href=\"https:\/\/futurism.com\/chatgpt-mental-health-crises\">screwing up<\/a> and <a href=\"https:\/\/www.nytimes.com\/2025\/05\/05\/technology\/ai-hallucinations-chatgpt-google.html\">making up facts<\/a>. That <\/span><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">almost certainly erodes public trust in the tech.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">There could be a myriad of other reasons, of course. In the researchers&#8217; view, some customers may be confused about what difference the AI technology actually makes in the products. Or they could be suspicious of the tech&#8217;s privacy and safety risks.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">&#8220;Consumers simply see fewer compelling benefits,&#8221; Gursoy told the <\/span><i><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">WSJ<\/span><\/i><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">, <\/span><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">adding that <\/span>&#8220;the specific advantages of AI must be obvious and worthwhile to justify the investment.&#8221;<\/p>\n<p>In <a href=\"https:\/\/www.parksassociates.com\/products\/home-controls-home-systems-home-automation-and-controls\/ai-in-the-smart-home-applications-and-consumer-perceptions\">another study<\/a> highlighted by the <i>WSJ<\/i>, researchers at the firm Parks Associates surveyed around 4,000 US consumers&#8217; feelings towards AI marketing, with a slightly more blunt approach: &#8220;We straight up asked consumers, &#8216;If you saw a product that you liked that was advertised as including AI, would that make you more or less likely to buy it?'&#8221; Jennifer Kent, vice president of research at Parks Associate, told the paper.<\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">The majority of respondents \u2014 58 percent \u2014 said that AI made no difference in their inclination toward buying a product. But 24 percent said AI would make them less likely to, and only 18 percent said they would be more likely to make the purchase. Broken down by age, 24 to 27 percent of the younger crowd (18 to 44 years old) said they were more likely to buy products marketed as having AI, compared with 18 percent overall. And 32 percent of those over 65 years of age and older, by contrast, said they were less likely to buy these products, compared to 24 percent overall.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">But the most striking thing? It seems that the AI hype has reached a saturation point. <\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">&#8220;Before this wave of generative AI attention over the past couple of years,&#8221; Kent told the paper, &#8220;AI-enabled features actually have tested very, very well.&#8221;<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Overexposure is a real thing. Companies across every industry are bombarding the public with exhausting ads that all scream &#8220;AI!&#8221; At some point, if consumer feelings don&#8217;t calcify into cynicism, they may simply stop being impressed.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><strong>More on AI: <\/strong><em><a href=\"https:\/\/futurism.com\/ai-therapists-professional-concern\">&#8220;Truly Psychopathic&#8221;: Concern Grows Over &#8220;Therapist&#8221; Chatbots Leading Users Deeper Into Mental Illness<\/a><\/em><\/p>\n<p>The post <a href=\"https:\/\/futurism.com\/customers-see-ai-research\">Something Hilarious Happens When Potential Customers See That a Product Has AI Features<\/a> appeared first on <a href=\"https:\/\/futurism.com\/\">Futurism<\/a>.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<div style=\"margin-top: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px;\" class=\"sharethis-inline-share-buttons\" ><\/div>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>New research suggests that slapping the &#8220;AI&#8221; label on products doesn&#8217;t always go over well with buyers, the Wall Street Journal reports. A new study published this month in Journal&hellip;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[182,177,183],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3309","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-ai-chatbots","category-artificial-intelligence","category-generative-ai"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/musictechohio.online\/site\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3309","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/musictechohio.online\/site\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/musictechohio.online\/site\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/musictechohio.online\/site\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/musictechohio.online\/site\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3309"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/musictechohio.online\/site\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3309\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/musictechohio.online\/site\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3309"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/musictechohio.online\/site\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3309"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/musictechohio.online\/site\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3309"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}