Feeling grounded when watching live streaming shows of highly anthropomorphic interactive virtual influencers: An exploratory study on customer opinions

• Customers can generate various feelings of groundedness across spatial, social, and temporal dimensions in AI live streaming commerce. • Customers’ feelings of groundedness can be affected by virtual influencer characteristics and customer characteristics, and can affect their purchase motivations. • Customers’ needs for groundedness vary depending on product characteristics and contextual factors. • While groundedness can be beneficial, excessive levels may have unintended downsides. • Customers can exhibit greater trust in virtual influencers than in human influencers. Powered by generative artificial intelligence, AI live streaming commerce (ALSC) employs virtual influencers (VI) to promote products. Despite its novelty and hype, research on VIs remains limited. We adopt a novel groundedness theory to study customer engagement in ALSC. Through exploratory interviews, we find that customers can feel grounded in ALSC. Such feelings can be primarily affected by VI characteristics and customer characteristics, which can also affect customers’ purchase motivations. The findings contribute to the ALSC literature by examining the emotional motivations of groundedness in customers’ purchase decisions, in contrast to the existing cognitive focus. The findings also extend the groundedness theory by identifying new sources, contextualized antecedents, and dark sides of groundedness. Additionally, the findings contribute to the VI literature by demonstrating that VIs in ALSC can unexpectedly create engaging customer experiences, which contrasts with the existing notion that customers view VIs as inauthentic and less engaging.