The new era in digitalization of financial services: Customers' adoption to artificial intelligence based banking applications

The latest research aimed to understand indicative factors of consumers' adoption to Artificial Intelligence (AI) based services. Nevertheless, following the pandemic, subsequent social risks, geopolitical conflicts and supply chain crisis, marketing discipline has evolved. The emerging disruptive technologies facilitated this change. The thesis investigates the determinant factors of customers' attitude and intention to use AI based banking services in Turkey and European Union countries, in the post-pandemic period. Within this research, features of banks' virtual assistants, characteristics of bank customers and perception of banks by their customers are claimed to have an influence on adoption to those virtual assistants. The thesis has another purpose of elaborating the national, generational, socio-demographic differentiation with regards to Virtual Assistant adoption. Research model built on Technology Acceptance Model (TAM) (Davis, 1989) with several integrations from Diffusion of Innovation theory (DOI) (Rogers, 1995) and Unified Theory of Acceptance & Use of Technology model (UTAUT) (Venkatesh, Morris, Davis, Davis, 2003) and perceived risks were evaluated, via the survey filled by 430 Turkish and EU citizens. Based on analysis results, it is revealed that, usefulness, proactivity and performance of virtual assistants positively influence attitude and attitude positively influences intention to use virtual assistants. On the other hand, EU citizens have a more positive intention to use virtual assistants, compared to Turkish customers and customers which command virtual assistants by voice has less adoption compared to other customers. With the contribution of this thesis, a TAM model with UTAUT and DOI covering all dimensions of virtual assistants and their users, was elaborated.