The Adoption of Artificial Intelligence in the South African E-Commerce Space: A Systematic Review

Globally, Artificial Intelligence (AI) in e-commerce has been widely accepted. A developing country like South Africa is expected to adopt AI especially in its e-commerce spaces. Notwithstanding the evidence that e-commerce is growing rapidly, South Africa's use of e-commerce is still growing with potential to grow further. This current study makes use of systematic review using snowballing approach. A total of 107 papers were searched and discovered for this study. These are papers related to e-commerce and AI fields. Iterations were applied to eliminate papers that were not relevant to this study. This was performed by using backward and forward snowballing. The paper also reviews the status of AI adoption in e-commerce and its application to the business landscape in South African context as well as the effectiveness on online shopping. The results of this review exercise show that South Africa has adopted Ai in -ecommerce over the past decades. However, it was further discovered that South Africa's e-commerce space is confronted with complex challenges and factors including the role played by the Internet of Things (IoT), Big Data analytics, ethical issues including privacy matters confronting e-commerce spaces. The role of government in the process is also notable as a factor and game changer in response to legislation and policy direction. The key outcome of the study shows that there is a need for a development of a framework for e-commerce in the context of South Africa.