This post explains why artificial intelligence (AI) is the key to building anti-abuse defenses that keep up with user expectations and combat increasingly sophisticated attacks. This is the first post of a series of four posts dedicated to provide a concise overview of how to harness AI to build robust anti-abuse protections. The remaining three posts will delve into the top 10 anti-abuse specific challenges encountered while applying AI to abuse fighting, and how to overcome them. Following the natural progression of building and launching an AI-based defense system, the second post covers the challenges related to training, the third will delve into classification issues and the last one will look at how attackers attempt to attack AI-based defenses. This series of posts is modeled after the talk I gave at RSA 2018.