The role of consumer experience in the relationship between technology acceptance and customer loyalty in AI-based services

The primary objective of this research is to examine the effects of perceived ease of use, perceived usefulness, and relative advantage of AI-based services (such as chatbots, virtual assistants, and recommendation systems) on consumers' attitudes toward AI-based service providers, and to investigate the mediating role of customer experience in this relationship. The study focuses on individuals who actively use AI-based services across various sectors, including content recommendation systems, e-commerce platforms, banking chatbots, and generative AI tools. The data were collected through an online survey administered to 500 participants residing in Turkey who actively use AI-based services. Structural equation modeling was employed to analyze the data. The findings indicate that perceived ease of use and relative advantage have positive and statistically significant effects on attitudes toward AI-based service providers, whereas perceived usefulness does not exhibit a statistically significant effect on attitudes. Furthermore, attitudes toward AI-based service providers were found to have a strong and positive influence on customer loyalty. One of the most noteworthy findings of the study is that the relationships between consumer experience, attitudes, and customer loyalty are not direct or unidirectional, but rather exhibit a complex structure. Consumer experience plays a statistically significant mediating role in the relationship between attitude and customer loyalty; however, this role suggests that experience does not uniformly enhance loyalty under all conditions. This finding underscores the importance of conceptualizing consumer experience as a contextual and conditional construct within the domain of artificial intelligence. Overall, the study highlights the central role of relative advantage and perceived ease of use in shaping consumer attitudes toward AI-based services and demonstrates that customer loyalty is largely driven by these attitudinal evaluations. The research contributes both theoretically and practically to the extension of the Technology Acceptance Model (TAM) in the context of artificial intelligence, to a deeper understanding of the multifaceted role of consumer experience, and to the broader literature on AI-based services within a developing country context.