Understanding the Determinants in the Different Government AI Adoption Stages: Evidence of Local Government Chatbots in China

Abstract

With the rapid development of artificial intelligence (AI), countries are increasingly adopting AI-guided chatbots to improve service on government portals. The reduction in face-to-face services under COVID-19 pandemic will further accelerate this trend. However, the adoption and performance of the existing chatbots differ. Based on the literature on e-government adoption and innovative policy innovation diffusion, this article examines both the initial and postadoption stages of chatbot usage in China’s local governments. While the first phase employs the survival model of event history analysis to explore the factors that influence the decision to adopt chatbots in local government, the second phase analyzes the determinants of those chatbots’ performance in the postadoption stage. We find that pressure factors and readiness factors play different roles in the different adoption stages. Although pressure can encourage local governments to implement chatbots, these governments’ readiness determined how well the chatbots perform after their initial adoption. The implications and limitations of the research are also discussed.

Responsible Urban Innovation with Local Government Artificial Intelligence (AI): A Conceptual Framework and Research Agenda

“…With a specific focus on technology for responsible urban innovation, the paper concentrates on AI and its use as part of local government systems. The rationale behind this selection is as follows: (a) AI, a technology with an increasing number of applications in the urban context, is referred to as one of the most powerful technologies of our time with both positive and negative externalities for cities [31,32]; (b) AI is an integral part of a smart city structure that provides the required efficiencies and automation ability in the delivery of local infrastructures, services and amenities [33,34], and; (c) there is a trend among local government agencies to adopt AI for managing routine, complex and complicated urban issues, where the knowledge and the experience of the staff in the area of responsible innovation, in general, are fairly limited [35][36][37].…”

Artificial intelligence in local governments: perceptions of city managers on prospects, constraints and choices

“…The adoption of AI at the local government level brings new challenges to the table mainly due to local government agencies, in general, having limited staff and resources and being more indirect interaction with the public members they serve (Agarwal 2018;Falco and Kleinhans 2018;Sun and Medaglia 2019). Nonetheless, there is limited investigations on how local governments adapt to technological changes and disruption, including AI (Matibag 2020;Wang et al 2020), and particularly understanding city managers' perspectives on AI systems is an understudied area of research.…”

“…In the context of cities, AI is the engine of automated algorithmic decisions that generate various efficiencies in the complex and complicated local government services and operations (Soe and Drechsler 2018;Ortega-Fernández et al 2020;Yigitcanlar et al 2020a). Managing city assets with structural health monitoring, energy infrastructure fault detection and diagnosis, accessible customer service with chatbots, and automated transportation with autonomous shuttle busses are among the many examples of how AI is being utilised in the local government context (Faisal et al 2019;Zhao et al 2019;Wang et al 2020;Bertino et al 2021;Dennis et al 2021).…”

Artificial Intelligence-Enabled Chatbots in Mental Health: A Systematic Review

“…However, a significant disadvantage of this approach was that the responses were robotic, repetitive, and impersonal. Additionally, it couldn't preserve prior responses, which might result in debates repeating [16]. In the 1990s the Artificial Intelligence Markup Language (AIML) was created.…”