The Effect of Voice AI on Digital Commerce

Voice-activated shopping assistants (voice AI), such as Amazon Alexa and Alibaba Tmall Genie, have been gaining popularity worldwide as a new channel for online shopping. In this paper, we analyze large-scale archival data of consumer-level purchase records from Alibaba, the world’s largest e-commerce platform, to empirically investigate how consumers’ adoption of Tmall Genie affects their consumption. The results show that the average consumer’s weekly spending the e-commerce platform increased by 16.6% within the first four months after adopting voice AI. Additionally, we explore specific product features that moderate the effect of Genie adoption by examining repeat purchases, product substitutability, and familiarity, supporting a mechanism that involves reducing information acquisition costs. The positive effects of Genie adoption remain significant on repeat purchases in the long term, although they attenuate over time. Furthermore, our analyses reveal that on average, the voice channel has a positive spillover effect on spending on the PC channel but no significant effect on the mobile channel. The channel dynamics are contingent on specific shopping contexts. Our results demonstrate that voice AI devices with shopping capabilities can enhance the growth of the affiliated e-commerce platform. As the first study to empirically examine the impact of voice AI adoption on e-commerce consumption, our paper provides valuable implications for e-commerce platforms and retailers leveraging voice-activated shopping.

History: Deepa Mani, Senior Editor; Guodong (Gordon) Gao, Associate Editor.

Funding: The authors acknowledge the research grant and support from the Marketing Science Institute (MSI). C. Sun acknowledges the support from National University of Singapore under the Start-Up Grant Scheme and the AI & Management (AIM) Research Center at Tsinghua SEM.

Supplemental Material: The online appendix is available at https://doi.org/10.1287/isre.2022.0140.