MALAYSIA’s e-commerce boom has transformed how people shop and how businesses grow.
With just a few taps, consumers can buy everything from daily essentials to luxury goods, often without leaving social media.
Yet behind this convenience lies a new challenge. As artificial intelligence (AI) becomes more powerful, it’s no longer just helping brands serve customers, it’s also blurring the line between what’s real and what’s not.
AI has revolutionised online commerce by powering product recommendations, automating inventory, and optimising logistics. But the same technology also enables bots to flood stores, scrape listings, and manipulate demand within seconds. Some even generate fake reviews or orchestrate purchases that never existed.
What began as a tool for efficiency has quietly distorted the marketplace, creating a growing trust gap between businesses and consumers.
According to the Department of Statistics Malaysia, e-commerce income reached RM1.184 trillion in 2023, a 5.1% increase from the year before. While business-to-business transactions made up 69% of that figure, business-to-consumer surged 7.7% to surpass B2B activity, signalling a decisive shift towards consumer-driven digital commerce.
Yet the more connected Malaysia becomes, the more vulnerable it is to manipulation. In the first half of 2025 alone, Malaysians lost RM1.12 billion to online scams, including RM63 million through e-commerce fraud. Digital progress must now be matched by digital protection.
The growing strain of digital complexity
For small and medium enterprises (SMEs), which make up 96.1% of all Malaysian businesses, these challenges are especially pronounced. Many have embraced digitalisation but lack the technical resources to detect or counter automated threats. Every fake order, fraudulent review, and bot-driven transaction adds unseen costs in security, operations, and customer trust.
The question is no longer how fast AI can accelerate commerce, but how we can ensure that growth remains authentically human.
That question has become even more urgent as Malaysia leads the region in mobile connectivity. Over 70% of Malaysian establishments now use social media in their operations, while 56.2% maintain their own websites. Social commerce has become Malaysia’s new digital high street, where promotions and purchases unfold in real time.
Yet this openness can create new risks. Fraudsters exploit one-tap checkouts, stored payment details, and automated chatbots to impersonate customers or hijack accounts. The rise of AI-generated personas makes deception even harder to spot, threatening to undermine the trust that keeps digital markets running.
Proof of human: A new foundation for digital trust
Malaysia has made significant progress in identity verification through frameworks like electronic Know-Your-Customer (eKYC) in banking and payments. But as fraud tactics evolve, e-commerce needs its own safeguard that verifies people, not passwords.
This is where proving one’s humanness, through technology such as World, offers a way forward. World provides an anonymous, privacy-preserving method to confirm that someone online is a real, unique person, without sharing any personal information. Using cryptographic technology, each individual completes a one-time verification that confirms their uniqueness – no names, no central database, and no risk of misuse.
For businesses, the impact could be transformative. Bot networks could be stopped before they ever reach the checkout page. Limited-edition items could go to real fans rather than automated resellers.
Verified reviews would once again reflect genuine human opinions. Instead of relying on large datasets vulnerable to breaches, proving humanity establishes a simple but powerful principle: one person, one verification.
This approach aligns closely with Malaysia’s broader digital ambitions. The country continues to build secure digital ecosystems that prioritise both innovation and privacy. Extending those principles into commerce could position Malaysia as a leader in trusted digital trade across Southeast Asia. For policymakers, it means a stronger foundation for consumer protection. For businesses, it represents an opportunity to restore fairness and authenticity to a system increasingly shaped by algorithms.
Keeping commerce human
As Malaysia’s digital economy moves towards the trillion-ringgit mark, one truth stands out: the next phase of growth must be built on trust. AI will continue to drive innovation, but its benefits can only be realised when people remain at the centre.
The future of e-commerce will depend not on smarter machines, but on ensuring that every click, review, and transaction begins with a real person. Because Malaysia’s greatest digital strength has never come from its algorithms, it comes from its people.
This article is contributed byRyuji Wolf (pix), regional general manager of Meridian East, an operating partner of World.
