Does superficial attraction hinders sustainable relationships with digital humans? Understanding customer commitment on digital humans in e-services from the utilitarian and hedonic perspectives

The rapid development of artificial intelligence technology has made digital humans (DHs) important interactive subjects in e-service systems. However, recent studies have reported that customers rarely accept DHs in e-service as people used to think. Given that DHs function as sociotechnical systems (STS), considering relationship management between DHs and customers in e-services to address these issues is necessary. To address the above concerns, this study uses the utilitarian and hedonic framework to investigate the construction mechanism of customer commitment (on DHs) in e-services. After three waves of data collection, a total of 703 questionnaires were collected. Multilevel modeling (MEM) and the response surface method (RSM) were used to analyze the data. The results demonstrate that customer commitment is constructed by a mixture of utilitarian and hedonic factors, in which customer experience plays a mediating role in e-service. However, DHs failed to construct continuance commitment in this study. This study not only provides corresponding theoretical contributions to the study of DHs, customer commitments, and human–machine relationships (HRMs) in e-services but also provides practical insights into the construction of commercial scenarios such as AI customer service and intelligent interaction systems.