Google, Temasek and Bain & Company published the 11th e-Conomy SEA report on 21 October 2026, titled "Building the Intelligent Economy". Its headline finding is that about 243 million people in Southeast Asia use generative AI, which the authors put at 58% of the working population. They say it took under three years to get there, around four times faster than mobile internet spread.
The wider digital economy is expected to reach $368 billion in gross merchandise value in 2026, up 17% on last year, and the report sees it passing $1 trillion by 2035. E-commerce makes up $226 billion of that (up 18%), online travel $59 billion (up 10%), online media $44 billion (up 22%) and mobility and food delivery $40 billion (up 15%). Digital financial services handle $1,650 billion in transaction value, up 16%.
The authors use tokens as their yardstick for the AI economy and project that regional AI use will grow 60-fold over five years. They find that AI-personalised shopping lifts conversion by roughly 10% and order values by as much as 75%. Shopee, they say, resolves about 80% of customer queries through an AI chatbot, trimming the cost of each contact by 30%. Generative AI has also overtaken social media as the second most used tool for planning trips, behind search engines.
Consumers look receptive to handing over more. Three-quarters of users say they would let an AI agent compare prices and complete a purchase for them, and 62% trust AI tools more than they did a year ago. They also set conditions: 44% want privacy safeguards, 36% want clarity on what the tools can do, and 30% want agent-made transactions to be reversible.
Everyday street and urban life in Singapore, photographed in May 2026
Getty Images (agency credit per file name; caption credit not read) · Image: CNBC
Money is the weak spot, according to CNBC's coverage. Only 1% to 2% of people pay for a personal AI subscription, and usage per person is around a tenth of US levels. Bain partner Florian Hoppe told CNBC that businesses find value beyond subscriptions, in e-commerce conversion, service automation and advertising, and described consumers as "very experimental".
The study covers Indonesia, Malaysia, the Philippines, Singapore, Thailand and Vietnam, plus Brunei, Cambodia, Laos and Myanmar; Timor-Leste is left out for lack of data. Hoppe's framing is that the appetite is there but the habit of paying is not, so the commercial upside lies in what AI does inside shopping, support and advertising rather than in monthly fees. The authors expect agentic commerce, where software acts on a shopper's behalf, to carry much of the projected growth, provided buyers feel in control of what it does.
Google, which launched the programme with Temasek in 2016 and has had Bain as lead research partner since 2019, urges more data centres, better energy efficiency and a unified approach to digital trade policy to keep growth going.
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