Ep 3: Tushar Shah

In this episode of In a Pinch, we sit down with Tushar Shah, Chief Product Officer at Uniphore, for a wide-ranging conversation spanning leadership, AI, fraud, and the future of agentic commerce.

Tushar traces his career across banking, payments, healthcare, and now AI — crediting early international stints and a willingness to listen and learn as the foundation for thriving through constant change. He shares that at PayPal, his first six months were spent almost entirely observing — a counterintuitive approach that built credibility and ultimately greater impact.

On building winning teams, Tushar emphasizes three non-negotiables: staying close to the customer, maintaining focus without chasing every shiny object, and cultivating accountability and humility across the team.

The conversation turns to one of today's most pressing questions: how do you balance AI's breakneck speed with safety? Tushar, fresh from Davos, makes a compelling case for human-led AI — where humans define the goals, values, and guardrails, and AI augments rather than replaces human judgment. He warns of the slippery slope when organizations let AI make judgment calls unchecked.

On fraud and abuse, Tushar draws on his PayPal experience to articulate a nuanced framework — behavioural fingerprints, knowledge graphs, cohort clustering, and smart friction — that distinguishes abusers from bad actors without punishing loyal customers. He cautions against myopic, policy-only approaches and urges leaders to look at the full business picture: returns, NPS, OPEX, and revenue simultaneously.

Looking ahead, Tushar is bullish on agentic commerce — but grounded. He compares Amazon subscriptions to early agents and predicts that as AI makes purchasing decisions autonomously, managing returns, detecting unintended behaviours, and understanding context will become exponentially more complex and critical.

The episode closes with a lightning round where Tushar reflects on the power of diverse teams, the women who shaped his leadership, and his enduring advice: you can be the smartest person in the room, but stay humble and meet your customer where they are.