Abstract
Livestream selling is an innovative form of online shopping that supports real-time interactions between streamers and consumers. However, a key challenge remains: Streamers have limited capacity to answer individual inquiries, whereas shoppers expect fast, personalized responses. This study investigates whether an AI-powered streaming assistant can address this tension by providing interactive, chat-based support to help consumers access and process information. Through a large-scale randomized field experiment on a leading livestream selling platform, we find that the AI assistant increases sales by 3.00% and reduces product return rates by 12.55%. Our analysis suggests that the AI assistant helps consumers feel more informed and confident in their purchases, thereby reducing uncertainty. At the same time, the AI assistant can occasionally disrupt the consumers’ livestream experience. Overall, the benefits of uncertainty reduction outweigh the negative influence of interruptions. For platform managers and policymakers, these findings evidence the potential of AI technology to enhance online commerce. The AI assistant is particularly effective for high-uncertainty products and for streamers with large audiences, offering implications for strategic deployment. Our research provides actionable insights for integrating AI into livestream selling and other digital commerce scenarios where real-time, AI-powered support can facilitate both consumer satisfaction and business growth.
Livestream technology enriches consumers’ online shopping experience, enabling streamers to demonstrate products in real time while interacting with a large number of consumers for product sales. However, tension arises between streamers’ constrained service capacity and consumers’ individual service demands on livestream selling platforms. Streamers can only handle a finite number of interactions and inquiries because of time and capacity constraints, whereas consumers expect immediate, tailored responses. In this work, we examine whether and how an artificial intelligence-powered streaming assistant (termed “AI streaming assistant”), which helps consumers with interactive chat-based support for information acquisition and processing, can mitigate this tension in livestream selling. We report a randomized field experiment on a leading livestream selling platform, where the consumers in the treatment group had access to an AI streaming assistant during livestream sessions and the control group did not. Our results reveal that implementing an AI streaming assistant increases sales by 3.00% and reduces the product return rates by 12.55%. Our exploration of plausible mechanisms suggests that access to an AI streaming assistant increases consumers’ perception of intelligent information provision (and, in parallel, interruption), which in turn reduces (and increases) uncertainty in decision making. Overall, the benefits of the AI streaming assistant’s intelligent information provision outweigh its interruptions, subsequently increasing consumers’ purchase intention and decision-making confidence. We also differentiate and explore two distinct modes of human-AI interaction, AI’s proactive and reactive interactions, and our correlational results show that these interaction modes reinforce each other in increasing purchases and reducing product return rates. This study contributes to the literature on human-AI interactions, livestream selling, and product returns in online commerce. Our findings also provide actionable implications for online commerce platforms in designing and implementing AI artifacts.
History: Hsing Kenneth Cheng, Senior Editor; Jingjing Zhang, Associate Editor.
Funding: The work was supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China [Grants 72201038, 72421001, and 72293561].
Supplemental Material: The online appendix is available at https://doi.org/10.1287/isre.2023.0103 .