Amazon is turning to AI to help fight scammers, the company announced on Wednesday. The retailer said some 360,000 customers every year reach out to its customer service department, wondering whether a message they received from Amazon is real or a scam. Now, customers will be able to ask Amazon’s consumer AI service, Alexa for Shopping, to help answer that question instead.
The company said its AI can “definitively” confirm whether a communication originated from its own systems by checking it against the billions of messages Amazon has sent globally. The AI analyzes the sender information, content, timing, message metadata, and more, to determine authenticity. Amazon said the system will improve as customers report more suspicious messages, helping it to spot scams more effectively in the future.