Jingqi Huang, Wasim Ahmad
As artificial intelligence (AI) is integrated into real-time e-commerce, it is necessary to study how AI virtual hosts affect consumers' immediate purchase decisions. This research is based on the Stimulus-Organism-Response (S-O-R) framework and explores the psychological mechanism by which the characteristics of AI hosts influence impulsive purchases. The scenario-based experiments show that AI anthropomorphism (ANT) and social conversation cues (SCC) affect impulsive purchases through two mediating states: cognitive trust and emotional arousal. The results indicate that the association between SCC and trust and arousal is stronger than that of visual anthropomorphism, and multiple group analyses show that this mechanism is roughly consistent across gender groups, but there are differences between the product participation and AI experience groups. This research expands upon previous work by testing visual and verbal anthropomorphic cues as parallel stimuli in live-streaming business, and provides guidance for the design of AI virtual hosts.