Digital humans in fashion: Will consumers interact?

Abstract The ongoing COVID-19 pandemic is disrupting the fashion industry and forcing fashion businesses to accelerate their digital transformation. The increased need for more sustainable fashion business operations, when coupled with the prospect that business might never be as usual again, calls for innovative e-commerce led practices. Recently, stakeholders have been experimenting with the idea of introducing digital humans for a more active role in fashion through the developments in artificial intelligence, virtual, augmented and mixed reality. As there is a lack of all-important empirical evidence on the consumer's propensity to interact with digital humans, we aim to quantitatively analyse consumer attitudes towards the propensity to interact with digital humans to uncover insights to help fashion businesses seeking to diversify their operations. The results reveal interesting, and statistically significant insights which can be useful for fashion business stakeholders for designing, developing, testing, and marketing digital human-based solutions. Besides, our findings contribute current insights to the existing literature on how consumers interact with digital humans, where research tends to be scarce.