The acceptance of chatbots in an enterprise context – A survey study

Abstract While Interactive systems such as Chatbots, are well known in personal environments with technologies like “Apple’s Siri” or the “Google’s Assistant”, the acceptance of said technologies in the enterprise context has hardly been examined. Literature shows that these technologies hold great potential for enterprises as they can increase productivity and are cost-efficient by automating processes. Still, to not alienate employees when introducing these systems called Enterprise Bots in this paper, it is crucial to understand how employees accept and adopt these new systems. This paper derives a research model based on the decomposed Theory of Planned Behaviour, which is tested in a survey with 198 participants. Results from a structural equation model show that intrinsic motivation of the employees has a strong positive influence on the intention to use Enterprise Bots whereas external influences showed smaller effects. The results indicate that it is important that employees are convinced of the usefulness of a tool for themselves. The paper provides theoretical insights and helps decision makers to introduce such systems.