E-CNY is an important carrier to reshape China's new payment pattern and accelerate the digital economy process, but there are still many obstacles to user promotion. It is of great significance to explore the factors affecting the intention to use e-CNY from the perspective of users. Based on the UTAUT2 model and the characteristics of e-CNY, a theoretical model of e-CNY usage intention was constructed. Then, taking the user data of the first pilot cities of e-CNY as a sample, the PLS-SEM and SEM-ANN methods were used to empirically analyze the influencing factors of the intention to use e-CNY. The results show that the model of intention to use e-CNY based on SEM has good interpretation and prediction ability. Trust, habit, price value, and social influence have a significant positive impact on the intention to use e-CNY, while performance expectation, effort expectation, and innovation awareness have no significant impact on the intention to use e-CNY. In addition, the relationship between the price value and the intention to use the e-CNY is regulated by gender factors in terms of personal characteristics as an adjusting variable. Experience can regulate the relationship between price value, habit, social influence, trust and user's intention to use. The combination of structural equation model and artificial neural network can improve the prediction accuracy of the model, and the importance of influencing factors has changed. Habit is the most important, followed by trust, followed by social impact, and price value.