Generative AI and Consumer Decision-Making: Examining the Effects of Consumer Trust, Engagement, and Purchase Behaviour Among Digital Consumers in Pakistan

Abstract

Generative AI has changed digital marketing in a fairly short span of time. Brands can now churn out personalized captions, visuals, and short-form video at a scale and speed that would have been unthinkable for human creative teams alone, and retail, fashion, and e-commerce companies have leaned into this heavily across Instagram, TikTok, Facebook, and YouTube. But there's a catch: people don't seem to engage with AI-made marketing content the same way they engage with human-made content (Abdelfattah & Mehdi, 2025). This study looks at how generative AI-driven marketing content (GAIM) shapes consumer engagement and trust, and whether these two variables that are alone or together to help explain the link between GAIM and actual purchase behaviour. It also asks whether disclosing that content is AI-generated changes how much consumers trust it. Drawing on the Elaboration Likelihood Model, Technology Acceptance Model, and Signaling Theory, and using survey data from 314 consumers in Sialkot analysed via PLS-SEM in SmartPLS 4, the findings show GAIM has a strong effect on engagement and a smaller but real effect on trust. Engagement itself strongly predicts trust, and both feed into purchase behaviour. Interestingly, disclosing AI involvement strengthens trust rather than undermining it a useful insight for marketers and regulators navigating Pakistan's digital economy.