India’s next big e-commerce challenge is not artificial intelligence itself but protecting millions of first-time online shoppers from AI-powered scams, according to Amazon’s global trust and safety chief, who said consumer awareness has become as critical as technology in tackling digital fraud.

Rohan Oommen, vice president for customer and partner trust at Amazon, said the rapid influx of new digital commerce users from tier-2 and tier-3 cities has made India distinct from more mature markets, such as the US, where e-commerce adoption has largely plateaued.

“India has a large number of first-time users entering the digital economy. Awareness is much lower, which makes education a significant part of the solution,” Oommen told TOI.

He said generative AI has made fraud more sophisticated by enabling fake identities, forged documents and synthetic reviews, but it has also strengthened Amazon’s ability to detect abuse at scale.

The company is increasingly deploying AI systems, including agentic AI that can carry out continuous audits, while relying on years of behavioural data to distinguish genuine sellers from bad actors. “Behaviour is much harder to fake than documents or images,” Oommen said.

According to Amazon’s latest Trustworthy Shopping Experience Report, the company removed nearly 300 million fake reviews, took down about 70,000 phishing websites, and acted against around 14,000 scam-linked phone numbers globally last year. Oommen said phone-based fraud remains harder to tackle than fake websites because establishing attribution is significantly more difficult.

On platform accountability, he said Amazon does not wait for regulation before acting against fraud.

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