Google and Southeast Asian technology conglomerate Sea announced a new strategic partnership that focuses on developing artificial intelligence tools for Sea’s e-commerce and gaming businesses. Under the agreement, the companies will jointly explore the building of an AI agentic shopping prototype on Sea’s e-commerce platform Shopee, aiming to create new shopping experiences that go beyond basic search and question answering.
The collaboration reflects a broader push by global technology firms to monetise their artificial intelligence models by extending them into more complex tasks, such as shopping across multiple applications and managing intricate workflows. China’s Alibaba, whose Lazada platform competes directly with Shopee in Southeast Asia, released a new artificial intelligence model earlier in the week that it described as being built “for the agentic AI era,” underscoring intensifying regional competition around agent-based systems.
Shopee was the most dominant e-commerce platform in Southeast Asia with a 52% market share in 2024, according to consultancy Momentum Works, and the new tools are intended to build on that position. Google and Sea’s gaming unit Garena will also use artificial intelligence solutions to “transform” the productivity of game development, signalling plans to embed the technology throughout creative and production workflows. The latest partnership follows a 2024 tie-up between Shopee and Alphabet’s YouTube in the Southeast Asian e-commerce market, highlighting a deepening alignment between Sea and Alphabet across retail and entertainment services.
