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ABSTRACT
Recently, advanced digital/internet-based technology has become more prevalent and advanced to play a dominant role in e-commerce. Among them, AI-driven technology innovation in e-commerce plays an important role for its development. There is research potential to discuss how AI-driven technology innovation can benefit the digital economy, as typified by e-commerce, and how it can contribute to the digital transformation of companies in traditional industries. This special issue expands our understanding of organizational and customer intentions and behavior toward AI, such as privacy issues, the perceived benefits and risks of AI-driven technology innovations in e-commerce and building long-term trust relationships between users and AI.
Keywords: AI-enabled technology; E-commerce; Digital economy
1. Introduction
Artificial intelligence (AI) refers to a broad set of software systems designed to perform tasks that traditionally have required human intelligence. AI is typically instantiated through machine learning and prediction, reinforcement learning, and deep learning. There is great excitement about the development of AI and its myriad potential applications that should benefit society and spur economic growth. Yet, there are also concerns about what AI technologies mean for the future of work, job displacement, individual privacy, and the potential for harm due to algorithmic bias.
Researchers thus recognize there is both a light side and a dark side to AI. On the one hand, it has been regarded as a next-generation powerful technology that can bring great business value and facilitate enterprises to achieve their business goals (Davenport and Ronanki, 2018; Mikalef and Gupta, 2021). AI has been behind many of the major developments that have taken place in e-commerce in recent years providing solutions to improve the performance of e-commerce and facilitate digital transformation for enterprises in traditional industries. AI has been a catalyst also for the platform economy and development of financial technology, among others. Some example applications of AI in e-commerce include recommender systems (Zhang et al., 2021), risk management systems, virtual customer service assistants (Cheng et al., 2021), visual and audio searches, and customer relationship management (Libai et al., 2020). AI is providing for greater personalization in e-commerce (Huang and Rust, 2021), improved matching of users in multi-sided digital platforms, and real-time price optimization, among others. AI chatbots are used to replace human agents by helping users with...