Feeling grounded when watching live streaming shows of highly anthropomorphic interactive virtual influencers: An exploratory study on customer opinions

Yancong Xie and Kevin C. Desouza

Journal of Business Research, 2025, vol. 199, issue C

Abstract: Powered by generative artificial intelligence, AI live streaming commerce (ALSC) employs virtual influencers (VI) to promote products. Despite its novelty and hype, research on VIs remains limited. We adopt a novel groundedness theory to study customer engagement in ALSC. Through exploratory interviews, we find that customers can feel grounded in ALSC. Such feelings can be primarily affected by VI characteristics and customer characteristics, which can also affect customers’ purchase motivations. The findings contribute to the ALSC literature by examining the emotional motivations of groundedness in customers’ purchase decisions, in contrast to the existing cognitive focus.The findings also extend the groundedness theory by identifying new sources, contextualized antecedents, and dark sides of groundedness. Additionally, the findings contribute to the VI literature by demonstrating that VIs in ALSC can unexpectedly create engaging customer experiences, which contrasts with the existing notion that customers view VIs as inauthentic and less engaging.

Keywords: AI live streaming commerce; Groundedness; Virtual influencer; Generative artificial intelligence; Customer engagement; Virtual selling (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2025
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0148296325003303
Full text for ScienceDirect subscribers only

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eee:jbrese:v:199:y:2025:i:c:s0148296325003303

DOI: 10.1016/j.jbusres.2025.115507

Access Statistics for this article

Journal of Business Research is currently edited by A. G. Woodside

More articles in Journal of Business Research from Elsevier
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Catherine Liu ().