GenAI Reaches 243 Million People in Southeast Asia, Report Finds
3 min readGenerative AI has reached 243 million people across Southeast Asia, about 58 percent of the region’s working population, in just under three years. That is the headline finding of the e-Conomy SEA 2026 report from Google, Temasek, and Bain & Company, published today, which says Southeast Asia AI adoption is running roughly four times faster than the mobile internet did.
Background: a decade of tracking the region’s digital economy
The annual e-Conomy SEA report has measured the region’s online economy since 2016, covering Indonesia, Malaysia, the Philippines, Singapore, Thailand, and Vietnam, plus four smaller markets. This year’s edition, subtitled “Building the Intelligent Economy,” puts the region’s digital gross merchandise value at about $368 billion for 2026, up 17 percent year on year, and on track to pass $1 trillion by 2035.
What the report found on Southeast Asia AI adoption
Usage is still early by global standards. The report estimates Southeast Asians consume 5 to 7 quadrillion AI tokens per capita, about a tenth of US levels, and consumers rather than businesses account for roughly 60 percent of that. Demand could grow as much as 60-fold by 2030 as people shift from simple queries to handing complex tasks to AI agents. Singapore leads the region: 70 percent of its working population, about 3.2 million people, use generative AI, one in three of them daily, and per-capita use is close to half the US level, according to Fintech News Singapore.
Commerce is where AI is already changing behavior. The report says 69 percent of shoppers use AI to compare complex purchases, 93 percent trust it in the buying journey to some degree, and 75 percent are willing to let an agent find the best price and complete a purchase. Lazada’s shopping assistant reached about 3 million daily active users during a sales campaign, and Shopee’s chatbots handle about 80 percent of customer queries. Money is following: companies with core AI products captured 80 percent of regional deal value in the last six months, up from 30 percent in late 2024, and AI compute and digital infrastructure drew $20 billion in private capital over the past year, led by the $11 billion acquisition of ST Telemedia Global Data Centres.
Why it matters
The report sets out four conditions for AI at scale: agentic adoption, roughly a threefold expansion in data center capacity over five years, energy efficiency rules such as Singapore’s binding PUE requirements, and falling inference costs that prove a return. Nitin Gajria of Google said the region “has a unique window to lead the world in agentic commerce.” The gap between broad consumer reach and enterprise usage that is only beginning to scale is where the next wave of investment will go, and the ASEAN Digital Economy Framework Agreement expected in November could speed it up.