Perceived Credibility of AI-Generated Influencers and Purchase Intention: The Mediating Role of Consumer Engagement

Abstract

An AI-generated social media influencer is a brand-new type of communicator on social media. These virtual personality facilitation and creation of visually appealing and consistent content is a necessary, but not sufficient, finding to understand marketing effectiveness of the virtual persona: (1) Does it come off as being credible and (2) does the feeling of credibility translate to engagement and purchase intention? This research is aimed to examine the relationship between perceived credibility of AI made influencers and purchase intention with a special focus of consumer engagement as a mediator between the two variables amongst the digitally active consumer of Pakistan. Quantitative design of cross section survey was employed. A total of four hundred questionnaires were distributed and 381 (good) questionnaires were used for analysis. The proposed relationships and the mediation mechanism was tested using reliability analysis, descriptive statistics, Pearson correlation, regression analysis, and PROCESS Macro Model 6. The results show that perceived credibility strongly predicts consumer engagement (R = .700, R² = .489, β = .700, p < .001), while consumer engagement strongly predicts purchase intention (R = .755, R² = .570, β = .755, p < .001). There is also an significant positive relationship between perceived credibility and purchase intention (r = .674, p < 0.001). As shown in the reported serial mediation model, the relationships between content reliability and purchase intention through these two variables (perceived credibility and consumer engagement) are significant, but there is no significant direct correlation between content reliability and purchase intention. The results indicate that credibility per SE is not to be viewed as the ultimate marketing result. Rather, credible AI-powered influencers become more relevant when their credibility creates active engagement with the consumers, leading to higher purchase intensions. The findings add to the broader research on source credibility and serving AI as a tool to assist with marketing research and provide researchers with practical recommendations for building and executing research involving responsible AI-influencers as a mediating factor on engagement.