Acceptance of AI-based tools in consumer financial decision-making: An application of the extended technology acceptance model

The development of artificial intelligence has led to an increase in scientific papers on its applications in financial services. Some of them focus on consumers, particularly presenting the aspects of automated servicing through robo-advisory systems. Nonetheless, relatively rarely does the research relate to the aspects of supporting consumers with AI-driven solutions for their own financial decision-making, which we find as a research gap. Our investigation focuses on finding how and to what extent AI-based tools empower consumers, providing support to their personal financial decisions. Our goal is to identify the determinants of acceptance of AI-based tools supporting financial decision-making, including perceptions of ease of use, usefulness, attitudes, and intentions to use. We base our work on the TAM model, for which we developed a dedicated scale to measure the individual items. The investigation is a pilot study that tests the survey on a representative sample of society. We gathered data through the CAWI survey research on a group of 371 respondents from three Polish universities. Our research shows that AI-based tools supporting financial decisions are primarily perceived through their usefulness and the potential to improve financial literacy. Furthermore, the PLS-SEM modelling confirms positive relationships between perceived ease of use (PEOU), perceived usefulness (PU), attitudes (ATT), behavioral intentions (BI), and actual use (AU) of AI-based tools in making financial decisions by consumers, except for the impact of PU on BI. We observed the strongest relation between PU and ATT towards AI-based tools, and between BI and AU. Our findings demonstrate that PU influences BI only indirectly through the construct of attitude (ATT). Such a phenomenon of a fully mediated relationship deviates from the traditional TAM assumptions. Our study confirms the coherence of the survey and the validity of the extended theoretical model of the acceptance and use of AI-based tools in consumers’ financial decision-making.