Southeast Asia (SEA)’s digital economy is primed for a new phase of AI-enabled growth as consumers, investors, and businesses alike embrace AI.
The shift to AI-powered growth comes on the back of an estimated 15% year-over-year rise in both gross merchandise value (GMV) and revenues in 2025, according to the e-Conomy SEA report by Google, Temasek, and Bain & Company.
The report, which covers 10 markets in SEA, estimates that GMV will reach $305 billion in 2025. And revenues for the digital economy, including digital financial services, is set to hit $135 billion this year, as advances in AI fuel business growth and enrich customer experiences.
Innovations like multimodal AI tools are giving SEA consumers tailored user experiences and empowering their decision-making. So their enthusiasm for AI comes as no surprise.
In fact, our surveys across SEA found that consumers’ interest in general AI and multimodal AI are 3X and 1.7X higher respectively than the global average.1
To meet those consumer trends, investments in AI are surging. Take AI infrastructure, for example: SEA’s total data centre capacity is set to grow by around 180%, faster than the 120% growth projected for the rest of APAC.2
Looking ahead, we share three ways AI will shape SEA’s digital economy, and the AI-powered marketing strategies that can help your business keep pace.
AI in user experiences: Satisfy consumers with tailored offerings
AI is making user experiences ever more helpful, relevant, and engaging.
People in SEA use AI to help them discover and create digital content. They also find AI extremely useful for translation, since over 1,000 languages are spoken in the region.
Among users in SEA’s digital economy, 75% say AI-powered chatbots, translators, and image search have helped them discover content and made tasks easier.3 Additionally, 74% of them find AI-enabled recommendations and personalised feeds helpful.4
How brands can satisfy users with AI-enabled experiences: Use AI in marketing to deliver tailored content and ad experiences at speed and scale for a wide variety of audiences.
With Google AI-powered multimodal tools, you can create relevant, immersive campaigns that supercharge customer discovery and engagement.
That’s what the city of Orlando did in a campaign promoting its hidden tourist gems. Its creative agency, Razorfish, used Google’s unified AI development platform Vertex AI to gather insights from 25,000 tourist reviews and come up with 1,200 mascots for local attractions.
AI in decision-making: Reach shoppers using multimodal AI in marketing
AI is also transforming shoppers’ journeys in SEA.
Surveyed users in SEA’s digital economy say AI features in digital platforms help them save time on researching purchases.5 And 30% of surveyed users say it helps them discover more brands and products they would have otherwise missed.6
Multimodal AI, in particular, provides swift, high-quality answers in various modes — text, images, and videos — to users’ complex search queries. And 45% of users in SEA’s digital economy say they expect to make decisions faster with less mental effort when relying on AI.7
AI Overviews, for instance, help users with decision-making by providing both a snapshot of key information relevant to their search, and links to a greater diversity of websites that they might otherwise overlook.
How brands can capture more decision-making moments: Reach shoppers across their multimodal search journeys by using AI-powered campaigns.
AI Max for Search campaigns let you expand reach into new queries you weren’t accessing before. It intelligently adapts your ad content to match emerging user intent in real time, so that your ad stays highly relevant and helps boost conversions.
When e-commerce platform Shopee wanted to scale user reach and optimise its Search campaigns in Singapore and Malaysia, it turned to AI Max for Search.
Its pilot campaign, using features like search term matching, text customisation, and final URL expansion, successfully delivered 2X more orders, at 49% higher ROI and 23% lower cost per order.
AI in trust-building: Strengthen trust to unlock high-value conversions
Bolstering user trust in AI will be key for sustaining business growth in SEA’s digital economy.
The e-Conomy SEA report finds that users are currently less comfortable with AI taking the lead in high-value transactions. Three in five users say they prefer final human confirmation, or use AI as one of several sources for decisions.8
So for shoppers to easily approve AI-powered recommendations of your products, they’ll need to strongly trust your brand first.
How businesses can grow trust with AI users: Build AI-integrated apps that are specialised for your vertical to generate expert, tailored recommendations. To further reassure users, take steps like these:
- Cite sources clearly: Help users be confident in the information provided.
- Provide adjustable settings: Let users decide what types of output they receive is generated by AI.
- Be transparent about data use policies: Assure users their personal data is used in secure and responsible ways.
- Provide security and fraud protection: Give users peace of mind about their transactions on the app.
Additionally, build your apps on trustworthy AI-powered platforms to reinforce customers’ confidence and help drive high-value conversions.
That’s how the Singapore-based Two App Studio successfully increased paid subscriptions. It used the AI-powered Google Cloud to build a platform that provides users of its journaling app with a seamless, private, and secure experience.
And with Gemini and Vertex AI, it created innovative app features where users can transform journal entries into biographies and digital clones. That strengthened users’ trust in the app, boosting engagement and subscriptions.
To succeed in SEA’s AI-enabled digital economy, speed is of the essence.
Already, among early AI adopters in APAC, 60% report business growth from generative AI,9 and 60% report more than 3X ROI from agentic AI.10
To seize returns in this age of AI — within months, not years — you’ll need to act now. Swiftly integrate AI in your marketing and build trust with users around how you use AI to thrive in this new wave of growth.
Contributors: Stephan Wu, Industry Analytical Head, Digital Natives; Nikki Del Gallego, Principal Analytical Consultant; Mike Koh, Principal Analytical Consultant, Oscar Liu, Principal Strategy & Insights Manager, Hong Kong & Taiwan
