Authors: Sagar Shivaji Thakare
Abstract: Artificial intelligence (AI) is becoming an important part of digital marketing. Marketers now use AI for personalized recommendations, customer service chatbots, targeted advertising, content creation, customer analysis, and other activities across the digital customer journey. These applications can make marketing communication faster and more relevant, but they also raise questions about privacy, transparency, trust, authenticity, and the appropriate role of human interaction. This conceptual paper reviews and connects research on AI and marketing to explain how AI-enabled marketing activities may influence consumer engagement and purchase intention. The paper uses a structured literature-based approach and does not use primary survey data. The review suggests that AI capability alone does not determine consumer response. Instead, consumer perceptions of relevance, usefulness, convenience, transparency, privacy, and trust play an important role in shaping outcomes. Based on the literature, the paper develops a conceptual framework and six propositions linking AI-enabled digital marketing with consumer engagement, trust, and purchase intention. The paper also discusses practical implications for marketers and identifies directions for future empirical research.
