MalaysianUpdates

Category: Artificial Intelligence (AI)

  • Strengthening the Human Element in Malaysia’s E-Commerce Sector

    Strengthening the Human Element in Malaysia’s E-Commerce Sector

    Malaysia’s e-commerce sector has experienced unprecedented growth, transforming the way people shop and how businesses operate. Consumers can now purchase everything from everyday essentials to luxury goods with just a few taps, often without leaving social media platforms. This convenience, however, brings new challenges, as artificial intelligence (AI) increasingly blurs the line between real and automated activity. While AI has revolutionised online commerce—powering personalised recommendations, automating inventory, and optimising logistics—it has also enabled bots to manipulate demand, scrape listings, generate fake reviews, and even create purchases that never occurred. What started as a tool for efficiency has quietly introduced risks that threaten the trust between businesses and consumers.

    According to the Department of Statistics Malaysia, e-commerce revenue reached RM1.184 trillion in 2023, marking a 5.1 percent increase from the previous year. While Business-to-Business transactions accounted for the bulk at 69 percent, Business-to-Consumer activity surged by 7.7 percent, surpassing B2B and signalling a shift toward a consumer-driven digital marketplace. Yet with Malaysia’s increasingly connected digital landscape comes vulnerability. In the first half of 2025 alone, Malaysians lost RM1.12 billion to online scams, including RM63 million in e-commerce fraud, highlighting the urgent need for stronger digital protection alongside digital progress.

    The challenges are particularly acute for small and medium enterprises (SMEs), which comprise 96.1 percent of Malaysian businesses. Many SMEs have embraced digitalisation but lack the technical resources to detect or counter automated threats, leading to hidden costs in operations, security, and customer trust. As social commerce becomes Malaysia’s new digital high street—with over 70 percent of establishments using social media and 56.2 percent maintaining websites—the stakes grow higher. Fraudsters exploit one-tap checkouts, stored payment details, and AI-generated personas, making it harder than ever to distinguish human activity from automation.

    To address these risks, Malaysia needs a method of confirming the authenticity of digital interactions. Innovations like World provide a privacy-preserving solution to verify that online users are real, unique people without revealing personal information. By leveraging cryptographic technology, World allows each individual to complete a one-time verification that confirms their humanness, enabling businesses to prevent bot-driven transactions, ensure limited-edition items reach real fans, and restore trust in online reviews. This approach emphasises a simple but powerful principle: one person, one verification.

    Adopting human-centric verification aligns closely with Malaysia’s broader digital ambitions, which prioritise innovation, security, and privacy. For policymakers, it strengthens consumer protection frameworks. For businesses, it restores fairness and authenticity to an environment increasingly dominated by algorithms. As Malaysia’s digital economy approaches the trillion-ringgit milestone, its next phase of growth will depend on trust. AI will continue to fuel innovation, but the true strength of e-commerce lies in keeping people—not machines—at the centre of every click, review, and transaction. By putting humans first, Malaysia can ensure a sustainable, secure, and trustworthy digital marketplace for years to come.

  • Rising AI Resource Consumption Unsustainable; NTT DATA Report Urges Action and Proposes Solutions

    A recent white paper from NTT DATA, a global leader in AI and digital technology services, emphasizes the urgent need to integrate sustainability into AI development and deployment to mitigate the growing environmental impact of the technology. Titled Sustainable AI for a Greener Tomorrow, the paper highlights how the increasing computational demands of AI—particularly in training large language models, running inference pipelines, and maintaining always-on services—are driving substantial energy consumption, water usage for data center cooling, e-waste generation, and rare earth mineral extraction for hardware. Experts predict that AI workloads could account for over 50% of global data center power usage by 2028. NTT DATA stresses that while these environmental consequences are significant, AI also offers opportunities to address them, such as optimizing energy grids, reducing emissions, modeling environmental risks, and enhancing water conservation.

    The paper outlines key strategies for sustainable AI, urging organizations to prioritize efficiency alongside traditional performance metrics like speed and accuracy. It calls for measurable environmental impact metrics, including energy consumption, carbon emissions, and water footprint, and advocates for lifecycle-centric approaches that consider hardware production, deployment, maintenance, and disposal. Best practices recommended include using green software engineering, aligning AI workloads with renewable energy availability, leveraging modular and upgradable components to extend hardware lifespan, and employing responsible recycling and refurbishment methods. The report also underscores the importance of shared accountability, requiring collaboration among hardware manufacturers, data center operators, cloud providers, software developers, policymakers, investors, and consumers.

    NTT DATA’s white paper warns that fragmented assessments and inconsistent metrics remain a barrier to meaningful progress, with many organizations focusing narrowly on energy or emissions without accounting for other critical factors. By implementing a comprehensive, end-to-end redesign of AI systems, organizations can reduce resource consumption while harnessing AI’s transformative potential. The report ultimately positions sustainable AI not just as a corporate responsibility, but as a strategic opportunity to create lasting value, strengthen organizational capabilities, and safeguard environmental resources for the future. The full white paper, along with insights on sustainability services, is available on NTT DATA’s website.