Who do you choose? Comparing perceptions of human vs robo-advisor in the context of financial services

Abstract

This study aims to investigate the differences in consumers’ perceptions of trust, performance expectancy and intention to hire between human financial advisors with high/low expertise and robo-advisors. Three experiments were conducted. The respondents were randomly assigned to human advisors with high/low expertise or a robo-advisor. Data were analyzed using MANCOVA. The results suggest that consumers prefer human financial advisors with high expertise to robo-advisors. There are no significant differences between robo-advisors and novice financial advisors regarding performance expectancy and intention to hire. This pioneering study extends the self-service technology adoption theory to examine adoption of robo-advisors vs human financial advisors with different expertise levels. To the best of the authors’ knowledge, it is among the first studies to address multi-dimensionality of trust in the context of artificial intelligence-based self-service technologies.