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Artificial intelligence (AI) has evolved for several decades and has become an integral part of humans’ lives in recent years. In the finance sector, banks and insurance companies can adopt AI to assess customers’ trustworthiness and merit to control financial risks (Anshari et al., 2021). They can also use AI to determine the prices of their financial products (L. Gan et al., 2020) and promote such products to prospective customers (Mogaji & Nguyen, 2022). Alternatively, AI can help present complex financial information in intuitive visual forms to ease customers’ information interpretation and comprehension processes (Choi & Kim, 2023). AI can also serve as financial assistants, including chatbots, loan underwriters, personalized planners, robo-advisors, and virtual assistants, to customers (Amato et al., 2024; Zhu et al., 2023). However, much research has focused on how financial institutions should design, build, and operate AI-assisted financial products (Hentzen et al., 2022). Others have investigated customers’ perceptions and adoption of individual assistants, such as chatbots and Robo-advisors (Arora et al., 2023; Belanche et al., 2019; Bhatia et al., 2021; Cheng et al., 2024; Zhu et al., 2023). Nonetheless, separating the perceptions of the AI assistants and the intentions toward their respective functions (offerings, products, or services) in a gradually united AI world is inadequate. Facilitating research on customers’ perceptions and intentions will help further develop AI-assisted financial operations.
According to Belanche et al. (2019), familiarity could be essential in customers’ acceptance of AI assistants. In other words, those who are more open and familiar with robots, AI, and online purchase and payment, such as young university students, are more likely to use AI assistants and AI-assisted products and services (Alt & Ibolya, 2021; Isaia & Oggero, 2022). Unfortunately, previous studies have primarily underestimated these potential customers. A few studies on finance and education have only explored how AI could help process financial information to assist undergraduate financial education (Yang & Stivers, 2024). University students’ perceptions of AI assistants and AI-assisted financial offerings and how this understanding can help with their financial behaviors remain principally unknown (Mogaji & Nguyen, 2022; Oehler et al., 2022). The lack of understanding of this particular issue is unhelpful to universities in educating their students about financial management and assisting them in their actual financial practices (i.e., school-banking initiative; Johnson et al., 2018). This fact also is a barrier for the bank partners of universities when designing and delivering suitable services to these young customers (Allahwala et al., 2013). Investigating university students’ perceptions of financial AI assistants and intentions toward AI-assisted financial offerings can assist in addressing these issues.
Vietnam, a young financial market, is not AI-resistant. Financial institutions in Vietnam have adopted fintech (financial technology) and AI to detect hidden problems and improve their operations (Lokanan et al., 2019; Pham et al., 2023). Students at educational institutions have used AI tools, such as ChatGPT, in their studies (Lan & Tung, 2023; Maheshwari, 2024). Nonetheless, the study of students’ perceptions of AI-assisted financial assistants has not been clarified. Accordingly, this study is of great significance, on the one hand filling the research gap and on the other hand contributing to providing empirical results to help financial and educational institutions in Vietnam develop AI-assisted services. This study investigates Vietnamese university students’ perceptions of AI assistants and how these perceptions affect their intentions to adopt AI-assisted financial products and services. The findings will enrich the literature on AI assistants and AI-assisted offerings in the finance sector and provide insights for Vietnamese universities and bank partners in their financial education and assistance initiatives.