When AI Designs the Product, Consumers Have Doubts

ATLANTA - A new study out of Georgia State University's J. Mack Robinson College of Business and the University of South Florida delivers a pointed warning to companies betting on AI to power their product design: The technology may make products genuinely more efficient, but it doesn't necessarily make consumers believe they're more sustainable. In fact, it can do the opposite.

"We looked specifically at product design and how people perceive AI and sustainability, and there was a clear belief among product designers that AI is not going to put the human touch and care behind designing a product like an actual human would," said Barbara Duffek, an assistant professor of marketing at Georgia State and co-author on the study.

After conducting controlled experiments, in-depth interviews with product designers and a live Meta advertising test, the researchers found a consistent and striking pattern: When consumers learn a product was designed by AI rather than by a human, they rate it as less sustainable. In one experiment, an identical backpack scored 4.27 out of 7 on perceived sustainability when described as human-designed, but only 3.61 when the exact same backpack was labeled "AI-designed." The product never changed. Only the story behind it did.

In a live A/B test running actual ads for a reusable cup, the researchers found that framing the product as "AI-designed" cut click-through rates and slashed engagement to a fraction of what the "human-designed" version generated. And in a separate experiment, when people were offered a free toothbrush with sustainability specifically in mind, more than three-quarters chose the human-designed option over the AI-designed one - even though both toothbrushes were, again, identical.

For companies pouring resources into AI-driven product development - and there are a lot of them, with AI increasingly used to optimize materials, cut waste and streamline manufacturing - this creates a genuine paradox. The technology can make a product more sustainable in objective terms. But if the marketing highlights the AI's role, it may inadvertently undercut consumer trust in exactly the claim the company is trying to make.

"As we conducted our interviews to figure out why consumers trust AI-designed products less, it became clear that it's emotional, not technical. We found that consumers perceive sustainability as inherently about love and care for the environment and society," said Duffek.

Through interviews with senior product design executives, the team identified a concept they call "genuine care" - the sense that real love, intentionality and moral concern went into how a product was made. One executive put it bluntly: "Why would AI care if my product's sustainable like a human would? AI doesn't have kids that are going to walk the Earth in a hundred years."

That sentiment turned out to be the whole story. Statistical testing confirmed that perceived "genuine care" is the mechanism connecting AI involvement to lower sustainability ratings. Consumers link sustainability to human values - empathy, responsibility, moral intent - and by default, they don't extend those same assumptions to a machine, even a highly capable one. Efficiency reads as cold; care reads as sustainable.

The good news for brands: This perception gap isn't fixed. In one of the more actionable findings, the researchers showed that when companies explicitly frame AI as having been "guided by genuine care for environmental and societal outcomes," the sustainability penalty shrinks significantly - though it doesn't disappear entirely. Simply being transparent about using AI, on the other hand, doesn't help at all. Transparency alone isn't a substitute for signaling care. Neither does it matter how AI-literate a given consumer is - the bias shows up regardless of familiarity with the technology.

In other words, the fix isn't hiding AI's role or hoping consumers won't notice. It's actively communicating the values behind the AI's design choices, not just its capabilities. A company that says "our AI was built to minimize environmental impact" will land differently than one that simply says "designed by AI" and leaves consumers to fill in the blanks - and left unfilled, those blanks tend to default to skepticism.

This study lands at a moment when AI is being woven into nearly every stage of product development, from ideation to manufacturing, and when regulators are moving toward requiring companies to disclose AI's role in design. That combination - more AI involvement, more mandated disclosure - makes this research especially timely. Companies won't be able to quietly let AI do the work behind the scenes much longer. They'll have to talk about it. And how they talk about it, this research suggests, will matter as much as what the AI actually accomplishes.