Industry executives and experts share their predictions for 2026. Read them in this 18th annual VMblog.com series exclusive.
By Husnain Bajwa, SVP of Product – Risk Solutions, SEON
As we look toward 2026, it is clear that AI will continue advancing the sophistication of fraud. The same technologies that enable businesses to operate more intelligently are also empowering fraudsters in unprecedented ways, and regulatory frameworks are struggling to keep pace, creating tension between innovation, compliance and real-world risk. We’re witnessing a convergence of three forces – adversarial AI, human-AI collaboration and regulatory modernization – and together these facets are redefining how companies identify trust, measure risk and safeguard their digital ecosystem.
Adversarial AI is designed to deceive or manipulate other AI systems and will play a major role in fundamentally reshaping the dynamics of digital fraud in the coming year. Such long-tail, AI-driven attacks will force defenders to think more dynamically and respond faster than ever. Traditional methods of defense, which focused solely on identifying bad behavior, will no longer suffice. To keep pace, businesses must learn to define what good behavior looks like and establish baselines that distinguish genuine human activity from machine-generated mimicry. The ability to prove humanness through nuanced behavioral, biometric and environmental signals, rather than static credentials, will become a defining advantage.
Yet even as threats grow more complex, the role of human expertise will remain critical in shaping, validating and supervising the AI systems built to counter fraud. While AI tools are more capable, we’re still far from replacing human judgment. AI will become a force multiplier for human discernment, not a substitute. The future of fraud prevention lies in explainable, adaptive and maintainable AI systems that support, rather than replace, fraud and risk experts. As the landscape evolves, we’ll need to build solutions that provide transparency and real-time insights while keeping humans in the loop for oversight and decision-making.
This shift in technology is already occurring simultaneously with major changes in regulation, forcing organizations to contend with increasingly sophisticated threats while navigating growing expectations for transparency, explainability and responsible automation. The pressures on financial intelligence units and regulatory bodies mirror the pressures on fraud teams: adapt or fall behind.
While today’s frameworks remain fragmented and siloed, 2026 will bring a push toward more unified, adaptive standards built on shared principles of transparency and configurability. The lesson from 2025 remains: static, volume-based fraud models are obsolete. The next phase of fraud and risk prevention will focus on building intelligent infrastructures of trust with systems that are unified, stable and capable of evolving as quickly as the threats they’re designed to stop.
