More than a third of businesses are tapping AI to fight fraud

Digital fraud is on the rise, in part because of generative AI fakery. Can AI also guard against these threats?

That’s what businesses seem to be betting on, according to a new report from Experian. It found that 37% of more than 200 companies surveyed are using generative AI to detect and protect against fraud. Meanwhile, nearly three-quarters (72%) of them expect that deepfakes and other AI-generated scams will be among their top challenges by next year.

“AI has emerged as both a savior and a saboteur in the fraud ecosystem,” the authors wrote.

Through GenAI-powered capabilities like deepfakes and voice cloning, the technology has supercharged certain types of impersonation scams. But AI can also help businesses better flag anomalies and suspicious behavior to get ahead of potential threats, the report said. Major credit card companies, for instance, have been using various forms of machine learning and AI to combat fraud activity for years—since the 1990s, in Visa’s case.

And yet fraud remains an increasingly costly problem, according to the report. Nearly three in five businesses said they lost more to fraud than they had the previous year. The top forms this fraud takes include identity theft, transactional payment fraud, account takeover, and peer-to-peer payment scams. At 37% adoption, GenAI ranks among the top prevention tools between use of passwords (40%) and captchas (36%), while multifactor authentication reigns supreme at 47%.

“In today’s hyper-digital economy, trust has become the currency of commerce—and it’s under pressure,” Experian North America’s chief innovation officer, Kathleen Peters, wrote in the report. “As we step into the second half of the decade, the stakes have never been higher. The convergence of increasing fraud sophistication, shifting consumer expectations and the proliferation of new technologies like generative AI is reshaping the identity landscape.”