Date: 15 May 2026, Friday
Time: 13.30 – 14.30
Place: MA-330
“Aversion, Adoption, and Agents: Rethinking the Consumer–AI Relationship”
by
Oğuz A. Acar
King’s College London
Abstract
Despite a substantial literature documenting consumer aversion to artificial intelligence, real-world adoption tells a more complicated story. This talk presents new evidence from a digital art marketplace where, contrary to the dominant narrative, early adopters in fact prefer AI-labelled work: across more than 470,000 artworks, AI-labelled pieces sell at substantially higher rates, with the effect changing based on visual properties. Combining field data, propensity score matching, and controlled experiments, we unpack the mechanism and discuss its implications for how we think about AI acceptance. I situate the work within a broader research programme on the consumer–AI relationship, from earlier evidence on aversion in AI financial advisory products to emerging work in which AI agents themselves become consumers.
The more meaningful question, I argue, is shifting from whether consumers trust AI to when they do, how that trust evolves, and ultimately who—or what—the consumer will be.
Bio
Oguz A. Acar is Professor of Marketing & Innovation at King’s Business School, King’s College London, where he led the School’s AI transformation as Head of Generative AI. He is an Expert at the World Economic Forum and serves on the steering board of the King’s Institute for Artificial Intelligence.
Named one of the World’s Top 40 Business School Professors Under 40, his current research focuses on how AI is transforming marketing, strategy, and innovation. His work has appeared in leading academic journals across disciplines, including the Journal of Management, Journal of Marketing Research, Psychological Science, and Research Policy, and he has secured significant research funding from the European Institute of Innovation & Technology and the British Academy. He recently co-edited The Oxford Handbook of Individual Differences in Organizational Contexts, serves as Associate Editor of the Journal of Interactive Marketing, and sits on the editorial review boards of the Journal of Product Innovation Management and the International Journal of Research in Marketing.
Beyond academia, Professor Acar has authored over 15 articles in Harvard Business Review and writes regularly for MIT Sloan Management Review and Scientific American. He delivers executive education programmes and keynotes on AI strategy for Fortune 500 companies and international organisations, and has been featured in in global media such as The Economist, Financial Times, Fortune, Forbes, and The Times.
Previously, he held affiliate and visiting positions at Harvard University, MIT, and NYU, and completed his PhD at Rotterdam School of Management, Erasmus University. He is an engineer by training with prior experience as a marketing professional in FMCG and financial services.