Factors Influencing Adoption Intention of AI Powered Chatbot for Public Transport Services within a Smart City
Cities are growing in size in all parts of the world.This puts a burden on the public transport infrastructure and creates numerous issues such as overcrowding, delayed services, and commuter dissatisfaction. Government authorities in various countries including India are adopting smart city concepts to overcome these problems. Smart cities are characterized by their extensive use of emerging technologies for managing various citizen services. Accordingly, researchers of this paper studied the adoption intention of Artificial Intelligence (AI) powered Chabot by smart city citizens for delivering anytime, anywhere, and automated public transport information services. These services can include finding routes and schedules, buying tickets, registering complaints,or collecting feedback from commuters. The study employed an extended UTAUT model to measure the adoption intention. A primary survey is conducted using a structured questionnaire and the data is analyzed using the structural equation modeling technique.The findings from this study suggest that performance expectancy, effort expectancy, social influence, facilitating conditions, anthropomorphism, and trust directly affectthe adoption intention of the Chatbot. The proposed Chatbot solution in this study has social implications in terms of attracting more citizens to use public transport instead of their private vehicles thereby reducing congestion, travel delays, and climate pollution. The study also provides vital insights to public transport officials and policymakers while designing or upgrading public transport information systems in a developing country like India. This study makes a novel contribution to literature as it empirically validates the intention to use AI powered Chatbot for public transport in the context of a large developing country like India.