Generative AI is now an essential part of daily life for 243 million Southeast Asians. Read about how this will impact the region’s economy in our 11th e-Conomy SEA report.

Managing Director, Southeast Asia and South Asia Frontier Markets

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Southeast Asia’s digital economy is surging, with generative AI driving growth toward a projected $1 trillion valuation by 2035. Consumers are increasingly comfortable using AI for complex tasks, signaling a shift toward autonomous "agentic commerce." To sustain this momentum, the region must now prioritize expanding data center infrastructure, improving energy efficiency, and establishing unified digital trade policies.

AI is growing super fast in Southeast Asia, with millions of people already using it to shop, travel, and manage money. This tech boom is expected to make the region's digital economy worth over $1 trillion by 2035. People there are starting to trust AI enough to let it handle tasks like comparing prices and buying things for them. To keep this growth going, the region is building more data centers and setting up new rules to keep everything safe and efficient.

In Southeast Asia, generative AI has become an essential part of daily life, actively used by 243 million people (58% of the working population) and scaling four times faster than the rollout of the mobile internet. This has major implications for the region’s economy, according to the 11th edition of the annual e-Conomy SEA report 1 . Building the Intelligent Econom y, by Google, Temasek, and Bain & Company, finds that widespread AI implementation is propelling the region’s digital economy to grow 17% year-on-year (YoY) to reach $368 billion 2 in Gross Merchandise Value (GMV) in 2026. This puts it firmly on track to exceed $1 trillion by 2035. Using tokens 3 as the new benchmark for the AI economy, the report projects that growing confidence in agentic commerce will drive a 60-fold surge in regional AI usage over the next five years.

Here are the three key takeaways from this year's e-Conomy SEA 2026 report:

Across the digital economy, AI is reshaping how people live, shop, and move. E-commerce ($226B GMV, +18% YoY) anchors this shift, as shoppers use multimodal discovery and in-app assistants to confidently navigate complex purchases. These personalized experiences organically drive 10% higher conversions and order volume uplifts as large as 75%.

In online travel ($59B GMV, +10% YoY), traditional search engines remain the top platform people use to plan travel, while generative AI has overtaken social media to become the second-most used tool for organizing complex itineraries.

Online media ($44B revenue, +22% YoY) is personalizing content feeds and connecting audiences with more relevant ads, yielding a 10 to 20% quality engagement uplift as commerce media becomes a $4 billion market.

Mobility and food delivery ($40B GMV, +15% YoY) saves consumers time via predictive suggestions, smarter routing, and AI-powered offerings like pooled rides, fueling healthy transactional growth.

Finally, digital financial services ($1,650B GTV, +16% YoY) help consumers with real-time fraud detection, broader credit access, and personalized financial recommendations that complement human advice, alongside Singapore’s regional leadership in digital wealth platforms.

Digital automation is already well established across the region, where 72% of users rely on everyday features like price tracking. This familiarity is clearing the runway for agentic commerce, with 75% expressing willingness to let AI agents autonomously compare prices and complete transactions on their behalf.

This momentum is rooted in regional optimism: people in Southeast Asia view AI as a net benefit to society, with 62% reporting greater trust in AI tools today than a year ago. Driven by proven track records (56%), rising familiarity (55%), and output accuracy (53%), this trust signals a clear runway for deeper platform integration. To feel comfortable using new agentic capabilities, users expect clarity and guardrails, including robust privacy safeguards (44%), transparent information on what AI can and cannot do (36%), and the ability to reverse agentic transactions (30%).

To support a projected 60-fold increase in regional AI usage by 2030, the region's broader digital ecosystem must systematically evolve across four critical conditions:

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