This study investigates how the level of physical anthropomorphism in conversational agents affects their persuasiveness. The experiment compared robots with low and high levels of anthropomorphism, akin to human appearance. Results indicated that while sophisticated physical embodiment did not universally enhance persuasiveness, it did have an interaction effect based on issue involvement. For low involvement issues, persuasiveness increased with higher anthropomorphism. In contrast, for high involvement issues, persuasiveness remained constant across different levels of anthropomorphism but dropped when robots closely resembled humans, possibly due to trust in high-tech robots. The findings highlight the importance of digital agent’s persuasive power and ethics in employing and designing robots.

With the expansion of the online environment, recently, recommendation systems have become established as an essential element of any online service. Following this trend, the issue of how to present recommended information effectively to users is attracting attention not only in companies but also in the research field. This paper presents a between-subjects study that aimed to elicit whether there is a difference in consumer’s attitudes towards the user-centric and content-centric recommendation approaches based on their level of psychological ownership towards the online service. Our findings indicated that users with high psychological ownership toward the online service prefer the user-centric recommendation approach, while users with low psychological ownership prefer the content-centric recommendation approach.

The rapid development and widespread adoption of artificial intelligence (AI) systems like ChatGPT in the workplace underscores the need for a comprehensive understanding of their implications on worker productivity, learning, and the determinants of their usage. This study elucidates the antecedents and outcomes of using ChatGPT among workers, employing a sample size of 351 participants across various industries, aged between 20 and 40. Structural equation modeling (SEM) was employed for the analysis, providing a robust perspective on the relationships between variables. The study discovered that perceived intelligence and self-learning of ChatGPT hold significant positive associations with information support and knowledge acquisition, both of which further influence the utilitarian benefits perceived by users, thereby shaping their intention to use ChatGPT. Utilitarian benefits were found to significantly enhance the intention to use ChatGPT but did not directly impact its actual usage. The intention to use ChatGPT, however, was found to positively correlate with its actual use. Among demographic factors, gender and age were identified as significantly influencing actual use, whereas the industry of users did not hold a significant impact. With these findings, this study offers a more profound understanding of how AI systems like ChatGPT can contribute to workplace productivity, and presents strategic insights for practitioners looking to effectively implement these technologies.

Recently, as Information resources being distributed in large quantities, small and medium-sized enterprises perspective, the ability to integrate and utilize the data itself became insufficient. Therefore, in order to compensate for this problem, in the consumer side, it is necessary to integrate the information that has been personalized. In the provider side, it is necessary to convert the information that has been popularized into custom information. The aim of this study is to derive strategic support services by investigating small and medium-sized enterprise's information needs and information resources analysis. To do so, this study attempted to develop a concept based on the design thinking methodology that is deemed to innovation concepts. Furthermore, we are trying to integrate the VRIO framework to design thinking methodology. We expect several key insights based on the integrated approach and will derive innovative concepts. This study will be the first attempt to develop a service concept that is based on consumer insight in the public institutions. In addition, these services enable SMEs to take advantage of the information and to improve their information capacity.