This study suggests the AI sports commentator (AISC) as a contextual advertising agent based on the three key attributes of the effective contextual advertising – applicability, affective tone, and content involvement. To enhance the effectiveness of the AISC as a contextual advertising agent, the study mainly aims to identify the impact of two core features of the AI sports commentator – commentary type and customization – on trust and, subsequently, perceived persuasive effectiveness and advertising outcomes (Aad and Ab) within the integrated theoretical framework. According to the result of 2 (Commentary Type: Neutral vs. Favorably Tailored) X 2 (Customization: Absent vs. Present) between subject experimental design (n = 197), this study verified that favorably tailored commentary, as an AI cue, weakens trust by triggering the negative representativeness heuristic and the identity heuristic. At the same time, customization action improved trust via users’ sense of agency. Subsequently, shaped trust in the AISC positively influenced the perceived persuasion effectiveness and advertising outcomes in turn. Also, multigroup-SEM revealed that the activations of heuristics by favorably tailored commentary were significantly varied by customization. Moreover, further robust ANOVAs empirically demonstrated that there was a significant interaction effect of commentary type and customization on trust, indicating that user-initiated (customization) favorably tailored commentary showed significantly higher trust than passive (non-customization) neutral commentary. These findings emphasized how AI-driven cue routes interact with action routes within the HAII-TIME framework. Also, by integrating the HAII-TIME framework with the persuasion knowledge model (PKM), the study underscores that trust, shaped through the AI-driven cues and actions (i.e., agent knowledge), functions as a critical belief that subsequently impacts persuasion outcomes. Besides the theoretical contributions in the context of human-AI interaction (HAI), this dissertation also offers valuable practical insights for the sports streaming platforms, advertisers, and even AI user experience (UX) and user interface (UI) designers.
