Responses to the AI Revolution in Hospitality and Tourism Higher Education: The Perception of Students Towards Accepting and Using Microsoft Copilot

This research aims to examine hospitality and tourism students' acceptance and usage of Microsoft Copilot for educational purposes in Egyptian public universities. It also investigates the mediating role of behavioral intention (BI) in the connection between hospitality and tourism students' acceptance and actual use of Microsoft Copilot. This study adopted the unified theory of acceptance and use of technology (UTAUT) framework to achieve the research aim. A quantitative approach was used via online surveys distributed and gathered from 760 hospitality and tourism students from nine public universities in Egypt and analyzed using PLS-SEM to test the hypothesized relationships. The major findings showed that PE, EE, SI, and FC affected BI to use Microsoft Copilot and highlighted a substantial direct influence of SI, FC, and BI alone on the actual use of Microsoft Copilot. Therefore, BI partially mediates the relationship between SI and FC and real-world classroom utilization of Microsoft Copilot. This clarifies that BI has a slight role in the relationship between SI and FC and the actual use of Microsoft Copilot, while the relationship between PE, EE, and the actual use of Microsoft Copilot occurs entirely through BI. However, there was full mediation between the use of Microsoft Copilot in the classroom and BI between PE and EE. The results have several implications for Egyptian higher education institutions and academics of hospitality and tourism and are also relevant to other institutions in a comparable setting.