Abstract: [Purpose/Significance] The research on libraries' artificial intelligence (AI) readiness and the influencing factors can help those libraries that are not ready to use AI technology to improve relevant conditions, so as to be ready to adopt AI technology for the first time. It can also help the libraries that have used AI technology to further improve the existing conditions, so as to be ready to upgrade or fully apply AI technology. This paper summarizes the influencing factors of libraries' AI readiness and constructs a theoretical model consisting of 1 core category, 4 main categories and 10 categories. [Method/Process] This paper uses an in-depth interview and grounded theory to construct the theoretical model of influencing factors. The basic process is as follows: To define the main concepts, design the outline of the in-depth interview, obtain the original data through the interview, open up the code of the original resources to form a series of initial concepts and cluster them into categories, encode the categories on the main axis to form several main categories, selectively encode the main categories to form a core category, and establish the relationship between categories. The model and hypotheses are verified by questionnaire and structural equation model. [Results/Conclusions] The results show that 9 of the 10 hypotheses proposed in the paper are valid. The nine factors including AI awareness, AI acceptance, AI value perception, AI application experience, data scale, leadership attention, innovation atmosphere, management mechanism and competitive pressure have a positive impact on a library's readiness to adopt AI. The positive impact of leadership attention is the largest, and the positive impact of competitive pressure is the smallest. The theoretical model needs to be further revised. Leaders' attention, AI application experience, AI acceptance, AI awareness and innovation atmosphere are the main influencing factors of the library's AI readiness. Accordingly, this paper gives the following suggestions. Firstly, library leaders are suggested to actively understand the latest technological progress in the field of library business, organize human resources to regularly evaluate the library's AI readiness and deploy the AI system in time. Secondly, libraries provide necessary AI training for their staff, and help them improve their awareness and acceptance of AI. Thirdly, libraries create a strong innovation atmosphere, stimulate the innovation enthusiasm of employees, and encourage employees to explore the possibility of integrating AI technology with their job tasks through various ways.

Key words: Artificial intelligence (AI) readiness, influencing factors, grounded theory, structural equation model (SEM), smart library