Google and Southeast Asian conglomerate Sea, announced a new tie-up on Thursday that will develop artificial intelligence tools for Sea’s e-commerce and gaming products.
Under this partnership, the two companies will jointly “explore the building of an AI agentic shopping prototype” on Sea’s e-commerce platform Shopee.
“This partnership with Google on AI will drive innovation in the business application of the technology at scale, and enable us to make AI more accessible to the digitally underserved in our markets,” said Forrest Li, chairman and CEO of Sea.
The partnership will look into quipping all three of Sea’s business units – Garena, Shopee and Monee, with AI-powered tools.
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Garena plans to use Google’s AI solutions to enhance gamer experiences and improve productivity of game development and operations. It might also get the opportunity to participate in early-access pilots for Google’s latest AI research projects.
Shopee will work with Google to explore building an agentic AI shopping prototype that can be integrated across both platforms to enhance e-commerce discovery, engagement and transaction experience.
Moonee will collaborate with Google on the tech company’s open-source framework Agent Payments Protocol (AP2), with Sea’s financial services unit providing feedback on AP2 to ensure its suitability in Southeast Asia. They may also look to pilot an agentic payment experience on Google and Sea’s platforms.
Sea already has tie-ups with Google, including the YouTube Shopping Affiliate Programme with Shopee, which is running in all markets in South-east Asia, Taiwan and Brazil.
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Sanjay Gupta, president of Google Asia-Pacific, said: “Together, we are accelerating the adoption of this transformative technology and unlocking the immense economic potential of South-east Asia’s digital landscape.”
The latest tie-up between the two companies comes as part of the efforts by global tech firms to monetise their AI models by promoting capabilities beyond simply answering questions and executing a much wider range of tasks from shopping on different apps to managing complex workflows.
China’s Alibaba, whose Lazada e-commerce platform competes with Shopee, recently launched an AI model that it describes as being built “for the agentic AI era.” This AI model, Qwen 3.5 has been designed to execute complex tasks independently, with big improvements in performance and cost that the Chinese tech giant claims beat major U.S. rival models on several benchmarks.
Shopee was the most dominant e-commerce platform in Southeast Asia with a 52% market share in 2024, according to a report by consultancy Momentum Work.