Customer Loyalty Formation in AI-Personalized Digital Platforms: A Mediation Framework of Experience and Trust

Abstract

Digital platforms increasingly use algorithmic personalization to adapt recommendations, offers, communication, and service interactions to individual customers. This study develops a quantitative framework for examining how AI-enabled personalization contributes to customer loyalty through customer experience and trust. AI personalization is treated as the principal explanatory construct, while customer experience and trust operate as intermediate relational mechanisms and customer loyalty represents the final outcome. The proposed research adopts a cross-sectional survey design for users of digital platforms and uses multi-item Likert-scale measures derived from established research on personalization, online experience, trust, customer relationship management, and digital platforms. Partial least squares structural equation modeling is proposed to evaluate the measurement model, direct structural relationships, mediation effects, explained variance, effect sizes, and predictive relevance. The framework tests whether AI personalization directly improves customer experience, trust, and loyalty, whether customer experience strengthens trust and loyalty, and whether trust contributes to loyalty. It also evaluates indirect paths through customer experience, trust, and the sequential AI personalization–experience–trust–loyalty relationship. The conceptual model suggests that personalization is most likely to produce durable loyalty when tailored interactions are perceived as relevant, useful, and convenient and when customers remain confident in the platform’s reliability, integrity, and handling of personal information. As no primary field dataset is supplied, the study provides directional expectations and a transparent analytical reporting structure rather than fabricated empirical coefficients. The proposed framework offers a systematic basis for examining the relational processes through which AI-supported personalization can strengthen customer loyalty in digital platform environments.