Supervising or assisting? The influence of virtual anchor driven by AI–human collaboration on customer engagement in live streaming e-commerce

Digital technologies such as artificial intelligence (AI) are driving the growth of live-streaming e-commerce. As a result, a rising number of virtual anchors who are appearing in live-streaming e-commerce, generating customer engagement. However, whether the virtual anchor driven by different types of AI–human collaboration has different impacts on consumer engagement needs to be further investigated. By adopting the use and gratifications theory, this paper investigated the mechanism of the virtual anchor driven by AI–human collaboration on consumer engagement and the moderating effect of the humorous response. The results of two studies demonstrated that the virtual anchor driven by assisted AI–human collaboration contributed to higher levels of perceived playfulness than those driven by supervised AI–human collaboration, leading to increased customer engagement. Meanwhile, it was found that the differences between the supervised and assisted virtual anchor driven by AI–human collaboration on perceived playfulness decrease when the humorous response is present. This paper fills in the gap in virtual anchor research by providing insights into how to enhance the positive effect of customer engagement and giving suggestions for future research on virtual anchors.