Beyond the Algorithm: Do Consumers Notice AI’s Environmental Cost?

As AI technologies are becoming more integrated into business operations, the environmental concerns are drawing increasing attention from both consumers and researchers. This exploratory research investigates the correlation between consumer perception of businesses using AI technologies and green AI, transparency and ethical consumerism in the context of the environmental footprint of AI. The research gap in this study is the lack of understanding of consumer attitudes towards businesses using AI technologies from an environmental perspective. Despite limited existing research on the topic three hypotheses were formulated based on theories and literature. This study follows a quantitative methodology and the Consumer Perception Theory was used to help interpret the results. A survey was conducted to collect data from 138 swedish speaking individuals and analysed using reliability tests, Spearman's correlation and ordinal regression on SPSS. The findings suggest weak, however noteworthy relationships between consumer perception against green AI and transparency. These results indicate that consumers are beginning to connect AI use with environmental concerns, however the overall awareness and understanding is still limited. No statistical support was found to support the correlation between consumer perception and ethical consumerism, which can be due to the complexity and low visibility of AI’s environmental impact. Organisations or policy makers can use these findings to improve communication strategies involving AI and the transparency around AI practices to align with emerging consumer values. AI’s environmental footprint is a growing topic of discussion gaining more and more attention on different media outlets and these results provide a foundation for future more detailed studies and suggest the need for deeper qualitative insights and longitudinal studies to track evolving consumer attitudes.