AI can unlock up to US$131 billion annual ecommerce GMV in Southeast Asia by 2030. With the increasing popularity of ecommerce, we launched a report studying how AI is already transforming the way we shop, and how it will continue to do so in the future.
In this episode, we talk about the average Southeast consumer’s journey with AI, how we use it, and why it can unlock US$131 billion in GMV by 2030.
Are consumers okay with AI listening in on conversations? Is AI listening to our daily conversations, and are consumers okay with it? How are consumers reacting to AI?
Tune in to hear our thoughts!
Also available on Spotify and Apple Podcast
Featured materials:
Ecommerce in Southeast Asia 2025
Transforming ecommerce with AI: Sell smarter, shop better
[AI-generated Transcript]
Phyllis: Hi everyone. Welcome to the Impulso Podcast by Momentum Works. So last week we launched our Gen AI report, and in the report we said that AI can unlock up to $131 billion in USD E-commerce, GMV in Southeast Asia by 2030. Is that, is that right?
Arana: Yes.
Phyllis: So now gen AI is becoming so common in e-commerce, right?
Phyllis: When was the first time you realized that, oh, this is actually AI that’s helping me to shop?
Arana: I feel like, ’cause I like to scroll, uh, e-commerce platforms a lot and the more frequent I open the app, like the, the recommendation engine. I think it gets better every time.
Arana: Like it will usually recommend me things that I, they think I would like and like probably 90, 90% is like accurate like most of the time. So like that’s when I realized I think AI is playing a big role in that.
Phyllis: Do you have any examples where you felt that the platform was surprisingly good or bad, or [00:01:00] The AI recommendations are very good.
Sabrina: Because I use a lot of TikTok, so for me it’s a lot of the content that you use. Yeah. And they always recommend you ai. They’ll recommend you the same video for the ads. Some of that they’ll start recommending you the product. Mm-hmm.
Phyllis: Yeah. So like just last night I inhouse bought some freeze dried mushroom chips because like I was scrolling through TikTok and I got this like random life of this lady selling freeze dried mushroom chips.
Phyllis: And then I. Clicked into it because I thought it was quite interesting. Right. And then after that, my whole entire feed was just, it’s just a mushroom mushroom sheet. I
Sabrina: didn’t know your TikTok shop would
Sabrina: change as well.
Sabrina: Yeah, exactly. Shop would change based on.
Phyllis: So then my, now my TikTok short recommendations now, right.
Phyllis: Are all freeze dried vegetable chips, freeze dried mushroom chips, freeze dried, encouraging strawberries and all that
Sabrina: tiktoks encouraging you to be healthier.
Phyllis: Yeah. So apart from this, uh, recommendation, we actually also wrote in the report that [00:02:00] there are a list of AI applications in e-commerce. Mm-hmm.
Phyllis: And these are a few of them. Have you ever like used any of them? . Mm
Sabrina: oh yeah. I use image
Arana: search sometimes actually when like, let’s say I saw something cute on like TikTok or like. Um, Instagram, like somebody posted their outfit or whatnot
Arana: I would just try to chuck it, chuck the image into these e-commerce platforms and see if they can find something similar to me. I always use it for, but like to find like
Sabrina: specific clothes usually. I think usually it’s mostly clothes.
Phyllis: I use a lot of the image search on AU because like, oh yeah,
Sabrina: I know you such in Chinese
Sabrina: it’s very good for finding dupes. Mm-hmm. Yeah.
Phyllis: So another one that we always see, right? It’s also these, um, you might also like.
Phyllis: Features.
Phyllis: Right. Do you get, you also get that a lot, like we were talking about the, that’s like the AI
Sabrina: recommendation or, yeah. Yeah. I think like they just recommend you based on things that you like,
Phyllis: and apart from that, also, [00:03:00] a lot of the product summaries are written by ai.
Phyllis: You wrote about this in the report, right? Yes.
Sabrina: Is it a product description or
Sabrina: the product summary?
Arana: They help you with the, with writing the product description. And then for consumer facing, um, ai, they summarize the product description again. So they would give like bullet points on like. The highlights of the products.
Phyllis: Are their titles also generated by ai? Yes,
Arana: it can be the name of the product. Yeah, it’s generated by ai. AI would help you create like a SEO optimized product titles, and I feel like that would be very helpful for sellers.
Phyllis: Okay. So we have some examples here, and I’m gonna guess if these are AI generator or not.
Sabrina: I assume that all these are anything in point form, like this is AI generator? Mm-hmm. I feel like the name, specifically, the name itself
Phyllis: is so like ai, you can see the
Sabrina: keywords that they like vintage leaf, everything. Yeah.
Phyllis: I asked aana, , do they have to put the disclaimer that is AI generator and then she said, yes, [00:04:00]
Arana: but sometimes you can’t really tell just. Solely based on the product images. ’cause like all of them looks AI generated. Oh, is the
Sabrina: product images, because they also use AI for the product image. Right? Not just the description.
Sabrina: Mm-hmm. Sometimes they just change the color. Yeah. Actually to identify.
Sabrina: . Okay. I think maybe got chance these models are AI because the models in the exact same post. Yeah. In the same post. This what
Phyllis: I’m talking about, like it’s the exact same thing, but it’s just a different color.
Sabrina: Okay. Next slide. This ai,
she look,
Arana: look
skinny,
Arana: I feel. What do you mean? I feel like product with white background are also ai, don.
Oh yeah. It’s probably easier. Yeah.
Sabrina: Okay, but how does it work? Because you tried as well, right? When you were listing, we tried listing some products on Lazada to test out how it works. How do they use the AI to help you?
Arana: So once, once you open the sellers page, you go.
Arana: And, and you try to add a product, like the AI Smart listing feature would just pop up and, uh, the first thing they [00:05:00] ask is to, um, for you to upload an image of, like a real image of your product. And then they would, uh, regenerate it, let’s say address, and then they would pick the model for you. But you can also like.
Arana: Put these criteria, like if you want like a woman or a man Oh, et cetera. So
Phyllis: they make it easier, not just for as the buyers, but for the sellers as well.
Sabrina: Yeah. So once, as long as you list the product. Mm-hmm.
Phyllis: Oh, that would be great. On carousel. Yeah.
Sabrina: Oh, that’s true.
That’s,
Sabrina: yeah. Yeah. You always wanna sell. I always de lazy on the Exactly.
Sabrina: Be great for herself.
Sabrina: For those, the others, there’s no like product description.
Sabrina: No.
Phyllis: They don’t describe their product,
Sabrina: right? Yeah, yeah, yeah. They don’t, the AI know
is it in
Arana: the cell
back
Arana: end? Um, like, I think it’s also optional, like you can use AI and you can also not ah,
Sabrina: oh, interesting. How the AI sense. Yeah.
Arana: This is
Sabrina: not ai. This is, [00:06:00] yeah, this is for sure. This is not ai. You know
Phyllis: how you know when the grammar is wrong.
Phyllis: No, and I think the easiest thing to recognize is their capitalization. So they randomly capitalize everything, like for non-AI because it’s a human error,
Sabrina: but AI also likes to randomly capitalize things. You ask GBT, like you just ask GBT for like title suggestions and all.
Sabrina: No, but they capitalize the first. Yeah. Like isn’t this also the first accommodation? Some are not capitalized. It’s not
Sabrina: consistent. Yeah, it’s not consistent. Okay. I think it’s the consistency. No
Sabrina: consistent. How about this? Feel
Arana: like this one’s also manual. Manual.
Phyllis: So my next question is, does
Phyllis: it matter if it’s AI generator?
Sabrina: For me, no. ’cause I think AI generator is easier to read, but it’s more summarized.
Phyllis: For me it doesn’t matter. ’cause usually I even read the product description.
Sabrina: Yeah. I don’t, it depends on, it depends on what you buy. Yeah. No, exactly. So
Phyllis: for all these examples that we found, they are mostly clothes and like this electronic. Right. But. If, [00:07:00] if I’m looking for clothes, I wouldn’t go and read the product description.
Phyllis: ’cause everything I can see,
Sabrina: you know what I think? Oh, sorry. You
know what? I think it’s very
Sabrina: useful. Now, I’m not sure which platform has this, but they summarize the reviews. Oh yeah. So it’s not that they summarize the description, but they summarize the reviews. So they’ll tell you like, oh, um, if a lot of people complain that like, oh, the sizing is very small, then they’ll put there like, sizing is very small.
Sabrina: I don’t know. What platform does this?
Arana: Uh, Lazada has it actually. That he actually wrote it in the report.
Sabrina: But I think that’s more useful. ’cause usually when you’re buying online, like rather than the description, it itself reviews. I came all the reviews.
Sabrina: Reviews, yeah, reviews. So the fact that they summarized that don’t have scroll through everything to be like, but I am curious how trustworthy the reviews are.
Sabrina: You wouldn’t know like what would be good or what would be bad, right?
But I think that’s more
Sabrina: useful than product description.
Phyllis: Apart from product description, AI is also most commonly used in chat bots, right?
Phyllis: Like customer service. How’s your experience with that?
Sabrina: I feel that it’s. It’s [00:08:00] really annoying. Like no, it, it works in a certain way. It’s like sometimes it’s a lot easier using a chat bot because it’s not like traditional FAQ, you know, you don’t have to go and find the question that you’re asking. You can directly ask the question that’s provided.
Sabrina: The question you’re asking is very generic, like how many days will it take to ship? But if it’s so generic fun, I can find it in the faq. But no, the thing is you don’t have to go to the FAQ school. I can just ask like immediately. Okay. Okay. But when you’re asking very specific question, I feel that’s when the AI chat bot.
Sabrina: Start to piss you off.
Arana: Yeah, yeah, yeah. They won’t know. So I think when you ask really specific questions, that’s when they would pass you to the real sellers.
Phyllis: , I think a few weeks ago I was either on top of Pinto, I can’t remember to buy like this bots for my nephew’s birthday. So it’s like those really, really big bots. So I wanted to ask if it can be shipped over and, and what the process is like.
Phyllis: The chat bot was obviously ai and I had to type in Chinese, which is very difficult already. Okay, so I got increasingly more annoyed because. With every question I ask, they just keep prompting me [00:09:00] with even more questions like, uh, what, what’s the category of your question? Oh, or what’s your problem?
Phyllis: And then every time I click, then they just try to like, ask me even more questions. And usually the questions are repeated. So then this is going nowhere. And at the end, I give out and I just kept saying, uh, I wanna speak to your customer service. I wanna speak. Speak to your customer. Speak to a real human.
Phyllis: Yeah.
Phyllis: And it went on for quite long.
Sabrina: Oh. I feel that’s quite a big issue like now. ’cause a lot of business are using like AI chat bots, so sometimes you just wanna speak to a person, you get them annoyed.
Phyllis: Yeah. And you also don’t have that like personalization factor, you know, because sometimes I just want to ask a very specific question,
Phyllis: but then AI cannot answer
Sabrina: me that. Yeah, yeah, yeah. If it’s too specific, then it’s really not like AI is not helpful in this aspect as all. But why you never time in English? Because Byr, the AI should be able to help you translate.
Right. I feel like I, in English, some of the, some of the content will get lost
Sabrina: because I think another use that we mentioned in the report as well is that it’s for [00:10:00] translation purposes, especially for platforms like let’s say Lazada, Shopee, TikTok, that are like in the Southeast Asian region and there’s a lot of different languages.
Sabrina: Yeah. Mm-hmm. So it helps you translate and it doesn’t just translate like the text, it actually translates the context as well. Like what are certain keywords that they think will be more applicable to consumers in this region than they’ll highlight those in the summary.
Arana: So I actually asked, uh, one of my friends who also one of my friends back in Indonesia to also try like chatting with the chat Botts, um, and. When they asked a question in Indonesian, the chat bot actually answered it in English.
Phyllis: Have you ever like had those experiences where you feel, wait, this is a bit creepy.
Phyllis: I feel like AI is listening to me. Oh,
Sabrina: all the time. Don’t you use sometimes like. No, sometimes at work, ’cause we eat lunch, right? Then we’ll talk about stuff like, oh, I was looking at this, or Oh, I wanna buy this and Right. Like every single one of my platforms so heavy and my TikTok shop were heavy. And then I’ll be like, wow, this the [00:11:00] nature.
Phyllis: At what point does it feel invasive?
Sabrina: I feel like to me, it doesn’t bother me as much that it’s invasive rather than the fact that it’s enabling me.
Arana: But then follow up one, one time I wasn’t even actually like talking. Like verbally with a friend. I was just chatting through WhatsApp and then I got the recommendation and TikTok and That’s so scary. Yeah. Sometimes you just type like the
Sabrina: words and then it shows up. Then I’ll be like, ah.
Arana: I’ll be like, oh
Sabrina: my God, I, oh my God.
Sabrina: No, it enables you like, okay. For me, the invasive part is one thing that. More. The part that bothers me more is that the more I see, the more I wanna buy it.
Sabrina: It could just be. In your head? Or it could be that the platforms like the AI is Yeah, it could be both. Either way. It’s not good for consumers that like to shop a lot,
Phyllis: but I mean, um, a lot of e-commerce companies are actually, I mean, everyone is going into AI’s like the AI era now.
Phyllis: Mm-hmm. And Alibaba has actually committed to over us. 50 billion. 50, right?
Arana: Yes. 53. [00:12:00] Around 53 billion to the AI development.
Phyllis: So how do you think AI is going to change in the future? Or how will AI affect e-commerce
Arana: I feel like it would just get more personalized every, I don’t know, uh, how, like, how it would be like exactly.
Arana: But like, I feel like, uh, in the near future, you wouldn’t have to think much about like what you wanna find or like, um, what you wanna buy from the platform. They would just give everything to you and then you just pick from the options. Like, that would be easier. That creepy. Think shopping would be easier.
Sabrina: That would enable me so much.
Sabrina: You don’t even have to search. That would be dangerous. That’s not creepy, but that’s horrifying me because then I’m just thinking, you such
Sabrina: a, you just need to cut out about how much money I’m gonna spend. You just need to cut out. You don’t even need to consider, you don’t search anything.
Sabrina: You just to browse through like reviews and all you cutting
out was so easy now. Yeah, like it’s. Like they fill in your [00:13:00] information for you. I don’t need to fill in my own info anymore.
Sabrina: So if you guys are interested more about how, um, about generative AI and e-commerce platforms, we do have a report that we just launched that would be linked down below and we also have our e-commerce report coming out that is coming out.
Sabrina: By the time this video’s out, it will be out there, will also be linked down below.
Phyllis: Okay, so that’s the end of this episode. Thank you for tuning in. We hope you en enjoy it, and if you like it to, give us a thumbs up and subscribe to stay up to date on the latest trends and happenings in tech, new retail, and the broader digital economy. Thank you
The post How AI is unlocking $131B in SEA ecommerce | Impulso E125 first appeared on The Low Down - Momentum Works.
