Southeast Asia AI shopping assistant usage and willingness-to-pay accelerate simultaneously

Latest multi-platform consumer surveys in Southeast Asia reveal that over 85% of users aged 18-35 are already using AI shopping assistants for decision-making, with 42% explicitly willing to pay for advanced features such as hyper-personalized recommendations, virtual try-on, real-time price comparison, and style matching (accepting monthly fees in the US$5-15 range). This robust and accelerating demand not only drives more than 25% retail traffic growth but also forces ecommerce platforms to urgently shift from traditional product-display + keyword-search models to full AI-driven end-to-end decision business models — encompassing conversational interfaces, ultra-personalized feeds, dynamic pricing, and AI-generated content. AI assistants are rapidly becoming the dominant demand gateway and traffic distribution channel in Southeast Asia ecommerce for 2026. Platforms that fail to deeply integrate AI risk significant user churn and slower GMV growth in the coming quarters.