Consumers Don’t Want AI to Seem Human (Acar et al., 2025)

Welcome to Revise and Resubmit, the podcast where we turn the pages of the world’s most prestigious research journals and bring you insights that challenge the status quo. This is where academic brilliance meets real-world application, and today, we’ve got an episode that will make you rethink everything you know about artificial intelligence and customer trust. Today, we’re diving into an article from the Harvard Business Review, a cornerstone of the FT50—the exclusive list of the world’s top 50 business journals maintained by the Financial Times. The title - Research: Consumers Don’t Want AI to Seem Human. Authored by the talented team of Oguz A. Acar, Anne-Kathrin Klesse, Mirjam A. Tuk, and Yue Zhang, this study reveals a counterintuitive truth about AI design. While many companies strive to humanize AI—giving it names, faces, or even personalities—this research shows that what consumers really want is transparency about the real humans behind the technology. By highlighting the expertise, effort, and decision-making that go into AI systems, companies can build trust, reduce resistance, and boost adoption. Published on January 7, 2025, by Harvard Business School Publishing, this research isn’t just insightful—it’s transformative. It challenges us to stop trying to make AI look human and start showing the human intelligence that drives it. A big thank-you to the authors and publishers for bringing us this thought-provoking work. Don’t forget to subscribe to Revise and Resubmit on Spotify, Amazon Prime, and Apple Podcast. And for even more deep dives into the fascinating world of academic research, check out our YouTube channel, Weekend Researcher. So here’s the big question for today: Could the key to winning consumer trust in AI be less about making machines look like us and more about showing them the humanity behind the machine? Let’s find out. Reference Consumers Don’t Want AI to Seem Human. (2025, January 7). Harvard Business Review. https://hbr.org/2025/01/research-consumers-dont-want-ai-to-seem-human Crolic, C., Thomaz, F., Hadi, R., & Stephen, A. T. (2022). Blame the Bot: Anthropomorphism and Anger in Customer–Chatbot Interactions. Journal of Marketing, 86(1), 132-148. https://doi.org/10.1177/00222429211045687 Sara Kim, Rocky Peng Chen, Ke Zhang, Anthropomorphized Helpers Undermine Autonomy and Enjoyment in Computer Games, Journal of Consumer Research, Volume 43, Issue 2, August 2016, Pages 282–302, https://doi.org/10.1093/jcr/ucw016 Youtube Channel ⁠https://www.youtube.com/@weekendresearcher⁠ Support us on Patreon https://patreon.com/weekendresearcher