A Study of Artificial Intelligence and E-Commerce Ecosystem – A Customer's Perspective

Abstract

The e-commerce ecosystem has been growing at an exponential rate and even in times of a global pandemic and nationwide lockdowns the e-commerce ecosystem evolved and adapted the same. In India, the e-commerce ecosystem has become a crucial element for the Indian economy as well as Indian digital users in a rather short span of time. The market is currently dominated by Amazon India followed up closely by Flipkart (Walmart-Flipkart) and the most recent introduction of JioMart, a major contributor to this exponential growth of the sector was the utilization of “Data” i.e. a data-driven ecosystem. The Artificial Intelligence/Machine Learning systems have played a critical role in the exploration of the vast data generated by customer 1 MB to 1.7MB per sec in a day, and thus the e-commerce industry implemented the AI/ML driven systems and formulated an ecosystem where both the operator and the user are in tandem where the operator funnels in the services and commodities and the user funnels in the data. But a major challenge for the same is cyber threats/cybersecurity, the extensive usage of AI/ML systems have made the e-commerce ecosystem a lucrative victim of data thefts, privacy invasion, data manipulation, and frauds and it is not limited to the parties having malicious intent but even the e-commerce operators are implementing more and more rigorous approaches for data accumulation that invades far deeper into the “privacy bubble of the customer”. Thus elements designed to deliver positive value to customers within the e-commerce ecosystem and even though the AI/ML systems have proven their hierarchy of benefits within this industry, yet in a significant share of customer are delivering the negative value of such systems as each customer has its own bubble threshold whether its social data, financial data or demographical data each customer is as unique as his/her digital signature. This has become more concerning especially after the NSA-Snowden declassification and since that customers have created a far more offensive privacy bubble and this approach of rigorous data collection, profiling, and sharing by the e-commerce operators within the e-commerce ecosystem has created a dilemma of data security vs. data growth.