Unlocking the potential of Artificial Intelligence: barriers and barriers’ inhibitors regarding the adoption of artificial intelligence-enabled products by consumers

Despite the optimistic forecasts of some years ago about the diffusion of smart objects (SOs), consumers' adoption of such devices is still in its infancy. Building on marketing literature about consumer resistance to the adoption of innovation, consumer privacy concerns, and consumer-smart objects relationships, the goal of this work is threefold: 1) identifying barriers to consumers' adoption that are specific to smart devices, and identifying the most important barrier discriminating between adopters and non-adopters; 2) identifying inhibitors specific to the main barriers to the adoption (i.e., data collection concerns); 3) identifying a new barrier to the adoption stemming from the possible relationship that can occur between consumer and smart object. Each objective is the subject of one paper. Indeed, the dissertation is composed of three different papers. Concerning the results, the first paper shed light on the main barrier to the adoption of SOs (i.e., data collection concerns); the second paper uncovers whether, why, and when the explanation about how an algorithm gathers and processes consumers' personal data and the level of control over the management of personal data that the firm provides to the consumer can reduce consumers' data collection concerns. Finally, the third paper uncovers a new, relational barrier to the adoption of SOs highlighting four different fears and respective negative social roles anticipated by consumers.