Will Stephen Hawking’s forecast that “AI will result in the extinction of humanity” come true? Consider Asia, where artificial intelligence is driving the e-commerce sector.

40 per cent of online shoppers use chatbots to acquire products and services, while 51 per cent of consumers are open to making purchases from them.

By 2025, 95 per cent of all customer contacts, including live phone and online discussions, will be driven by AI (without human agents). Consumer expectations for businesses to embrace visual technology like holograms and virtual and augmented reality are projected to soar simultaneously. Businesses that don’t get ready for this future run the risk of falling behind their rivals.

The e-commerce business is booming in developing nations. Vietnam, Thailand, and other Asian countries demonstrate the involvement of numerous e-commerce businesses with widespread public backing.

Due to the positive feedback from many clients, internet shopping has been more popular recently. Nevertheless, regardless of whether AI “wipes out” humans, this combination may one day result in a boom in the retail industry.

AI – Stealth 24/7 supporter in e-commerce customer service

Chatbots and digital assistants are the areas of AI that are currently most often employed. Customers are gradually beginning to find these characteristics to be trustworthy and useful. They are there to support and assist people when they need it, not to entirely replace people.

Also Read: #dltledgers unveils 2023 trends in supply chain digitisation

AI-powered chatbots can solve many simple and minor difficulties, leaving customer care to handle more complicated problems. Compared to a standard human-driven help desk, this method is far more effective and time-saving.

Chatbots have now become “hard workers” handling simple tasks related to e-commerce, such as recommending products, encouraging purchases, tracking shopping carts, and updating financial information accounts. Chatbots also can issue a notification to end the automatic process and resume the conversation through real person-to-person interaction.

E-commerce Artificial Intelligence (AI) tools and AI-powered digital assistants, like Google’s Duplex engine, are gaining the ability to make shopping lists using a customer’s genuine voice and even place an order for them online.

Some of the key AI applications in e-commerce are more successful than others at achieving online or in-store commerce objectives. From this vantage point, it should be emphasised that although artificial intelligence in e-commerce has many advantages, these are the most prevalent uses of AI in the sector.

Chatbots have now become “hard workers” handling simple tasks related to e-commerce, such as recommending products, encouraging purchases, and tracking shopping carts. They also can issue a notification to end the automatic process and resume the conversation through real person-to-person interaction.

AI support customer service for Shopee in Vietnam

Shopee, the largest e-commerce platform in Southeast Asia, has been active in the Vietnam market since 2016 and has achieved a lot during that time. We may ignore the poor quality of the retailers on this online marketplace and focus on how Shopee has pleased customers with the standard of its chatbot-based customer support.

Shopee is dedicated to the buyers on this platform and the stores linked to it for sales operations. They are the ones who give Shopee the majority of its income.

Shopee’s chatbots address problems with payment methods, shipping times, purchase options, and resolving complaints. Chatbots are installed by Shopee’s algorithm to provide automated client service. The chatbots will immediately transmit the pre-set responses to clients if they have any questions.

One Shopee user reported that the company’s chatbots satisfied his needs even at the busiest hours of the day. When he wishes to ask, the issue of not being able to pay for his order is also resolved because the system is already in place.

However, when urgent issues require quick attention and clients are not satisfied with the chatbots’ responses, AI is not always a useful tool in customer service.

Once, a glitch with my account prevented me from logging in, and using chatbots was also unavailable. Calling the radio and scheduling a meeting with customer service was my best action. Only humans can directly address issues at times like these.

Human resources are still “in the town” of supporting e-commerce

Even though the world is going more quickly toward AI or automated sales, human psychology still favours learning from a human. Shortly, 85 per cent of sales will reportedly be made without the involvement of any human beings. Since AI is more efficient, intelligent, and sensible. You might also discover that the seller’s website has answers to many of your questions.

These efforts are being made to help you save time and money. As a result, software businesses are competing to eliminate human needs from customer support, and they are somewhat effective in doing so.

Also Read: These Artificial Intelligence startups are proving to be industry game-changers

Despite having access to these services, customers still prefer to speak with a live person before buying. Customers’ preference for in-person sales encounters can be attributed to several factors. AI won’t entirely replace humans in the early future. 

People enjoy hearing from a professional salesperson about a specific product. Your consumers will therefore perceive that you are interested in them if you use human sales contacts. Sharing individual selling experiences fosters the development of enduring bonds between buyers and sellers.

It appears that consumers still do not have the habit of making purchases solely through automated means. An actual human voice can assist them in moving down the sales funnel instead.

AI and humans – A perfect combination

We believe that combining AI and humans is the perfect solution. Since AI and humans can do various duties, it would be beneficial for online retailers to incorporate their advantages into their business strategies.

The use of cutting-edge technology in your company is something you should do as a modern business owner. However, you should add human contacts to your online store to satisfy customer demand. If not, you risk alienating a lot of potential clients. Live chat for e-commerce may be a clever modern strategy to maintain contact with your leads.

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For many merchants – whether they be enterprises or SMEs – creating simple, seamless checkout experiences that meet the needs of a diverse set of customers in different geographies is a challenge that only seems to get more complex. 

For online merchants, the value of investing in payments is well recognised. Payments are the gateway to their customers, inextricably tied to the growth of their business.

The long and winding road of payments

But the payments roadmap is also notoriously long and expensive. It kills innovation by diverting resources from strategic business objectives to operational functions. 

In the face of a looming recession, merchants increasingly face another problem: staying competitive while adjusting their business expenditures to the current economic environment. 

If there is anything to be gained from weathering the storm of an economic downturn, it’s learning how to do more with less. It forces us to ask: are we optimising our business? Are we incorporating the resilience and flexibility to pivot (again) if we need to?

Also Read: Year of the rabbit: Leaping into a bumper year for digital payments

You would think that we’d have learned about resilience, having just emerged from the pandemic. But with parts of the digital economy enjoying the tailwinds of the pandemic online boom, many in the sector are only now feeling the pinch.

There’s one area that’s not set for a downturn: digital spending. In fact, recent forecasts from Gartner expect tech spending in 2023 to rise by more than six per cent from last year. 

There’s a reason for that. Essentially it’s about digitising to optimise: automating processes to accelerate sustainable growth and create efficiencies. I have seen this firsthand, particularly how automating payments has streamlined and simplified our clients’ processes, enabling them to focus their development resources towards building their core business.

So, why payments?

Firstly, payment tools are expensive and notoriously difficult to implement. This is particularly the case in the Asia Pacific, where the network of payment providers is fragmented and spread across geographies.

Payments automation  – like the solution offered by Primer – has come a long way in a short time. And the benefits have been game-changers.

More than just cross-border functionality, incorporating and offering new payment methods like e-wallets, bank transfers, or BNPL allows customers to have more choices according to their personal preferences.  Expanding the breadth of payment options immediately increases a business’ addressable market. 

When your business goes global (or perhaps it already is), consolidation of all the payment methods on a platform that is automated to meet customers’ preferences can kill the integration roadmap, helping businesses go to market faster. Smoother and easier payment processes help to see through the checkout process, eliminating redundancies like complex reconciliation and risk management.

Also Read: Navigating the payment regulations in Singapore

Further, in the context of a dynamic fintech sector and its constantly changing landscape (think crypto and its volatility), building resilience is also about incorporating flexibility into your payments infrastructure.

Importantly, resilience is also about utilising what automation provides you with – data. The Primer team has helped businesses of every size integrate infrastructure to help them customise payments based on powerful insights from their data. 

To automate or to not

But payments are just the beginning. Establishing a simple e-commerce offering is more accessible to small businesses than it ever has been before. But historically, integrating all of the functionality and efficiencies that commerce tools have to offer has not been so simple. 

Multiple payment options, automating sophisticated, professional commerce functionality like fraud detection, shipping and returns and customer loyalty tools are no longer limited to large enterprise merchants with swathes of developers at their disposal. 

Now, automating these tools can help a business of any size to create the foundations to scale quickly and efficiently – and to achieve more with less. 

Having an open, agnostic infrastructure for easy integration of payments and commerce tools is not just about saving time on back-end costs. It’s about getting access to services that businesses may not know they need today.  In this sense, it’s built-in future-proofing.

Automation of payments and commerce is levelling the playing field by enabling companies to do more with less. I have seen clients with small teams achieve things that were previously the domain of much larger organisations. In the years to come, even as recessionary pressures ease, more businesses will learn to operate with this principle in mind, freeing up their resources to focus on the important task of accelerating the growth of their business.

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Instill AI, a startup providing tools to derive insights or generate meaningful content from unstructured data, has secured US$3.6 million in a seed funding round.

RTP Global led the round, with co-investments from Lunar Ventures and Hive Ventures.

Charles Songhurst, former Microsoft executive; Demetrios Kellari, Head of Systems and Technology Integration at Cavnue; Mehdi Ghissassi, Director of Product for Google’s AI/ML research org; also joined.

The investment will enable the startup to launch later this year a fully managed cloud service to remove the stress of infrastructure maintenance for community members. To accomplish this, Instill AI will expand its hiring efforts and double its headcount by the end of 2023.

Also Read: Taiwanese enterprise AI startup Profet AI secures US$5.6M Series A

Founded in 2020 by Ping-Lin Chang and Xiaofei Du, Taiwan- and London-based Instill AI provides modern data and AI teams with no/low-code tools to streamline the process of distilling the value of unstructured data and converting unstructured data into meaningful data representations.

By integrating Instill AI’s solution into their data stack, data and AI teams can glean richer insights, uncover unknown patterns, develop AI applications faster, and work more efficiently.

Instill AI has also introduced its open-source project — Versatile Data Pipeline (VDP) for unstructured data ETL (Extract, Transform and Load) — which brings AI into the modern data stack.

“It is about time to give unstructured data more love. Unstructured data can be more valuable if AI is more accessible. We at Instill AI are fully committed to solving the problem,” said Chang, Co-Founder and CEO.

In 2021, it secured a pre-seed round from Cornerstone Ventures.

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In 2022, Singapore secured its position as the leading market and hub for femtech innovations with 32 companies founded and operating in the country, a 45 per cent increase from the previous year. Its neighbouring country Malaysia caught up as runner-up with 12 companies; this number is a 500 per cent increase from the previous year in the country.

According to a report released by women’s wellness solutions provider Fermata, there was a steady growth in femtech companies across the Southeast Asian (SEA) region, including the Philippines (nine companies), Thailand (six companies), Indonesia (five companies), and Vietnam (four companies).

However, for emerging markets such as Cambodia, Laos, and Myanmar, the growth had been stagnant since last year, when the report acknowledged difficulties in finding femtech companies operating in the countries through desktop research.

For these markets, the report pointed out that there is a need “to be more focused on general public health issues, period poverty, and hygiene safety” which might be the reason why femtech industry is not growing rapidly. Political instability such as the Myanmar coup in 2021 also further escalated the issue of period poverty as women struggled to afford period products due to rising prices.

Also Read: Femtech: VC interest grows as new frontier for women’s health beckons

Coined in 2012, femtech (“female technology”) was defined as an industry of tech companies that addressed women health’s needs. Companies in the sector can be divided into the B2C and B2B categories, each of them with its own unique products and target audiences.

B2C companies mostly provided services and products related to sexual wellness, sexual health and intimate care, fertility and infertility, period health, perimenopause and menopause, pregnancy and post-partum, and general women’s health. These companies might implement an element of e-commerce in how they distribute their services and products to customers.

In the B2B sector, tech companies worked together with institutions in the medical industry to provide tools for diagnostics and testing.

From policy to social media

This led to a big question: What did it take to build a robust ecosystem for femtech startups?

Singapore was already well-known as a leading startup ecosystem on a global scale, according to various reports. However, in the case of femtech, there were several factors that helped secure its status as a femtech hub.

There were commonly known factors such as Singapore’s ability to become a “great” test bed for new innovation before a company can further expand to another market. But Fermata highlighted “societal, legislative, and governmental forces that have created new avenues for dialogue in women’s health and wellness.”

Also Read: Overcoming advertising woes and other challenges for the femtech industry

There were two ways in which these conversations were being brought to the public:

1. Research and Development

In December 2020, The Singapore National Research Foundation launched the Research Innovation Enterprise Plan 2025 (RIE 2025) with an approximate S$25 billion (US$18 billion) budget. There were two research domains that are relevant to the femtech industry: Human Health and Potential (HHP) and Smart Nation and Digital Economy (SNDE).

“Supporting research and development funding in this field is critical to tackling the issue of women’s health at the root,” the report stated.

2. Social and media conversation on fertility

There were several notable moments in social media and media that helped to skyrocket the discussion on women’s health, creating further awareness and opening up new business opportunities. In early 2021, following a report about Singapore’s declining fertility rate, social media was rife with a conversation regarding fertility and family planning. This included an online petition and Instagram account MyEggsMyTime by user Emma Zhang.

What is next for femtech in SEA?

Seeing how the femtech industry in SEA had progressed in the past few years, Fermata predicted that the industry will continue to grow in SEA.

There were several points that the report believes will be relevant:

1. Education and awareness activities will continue to focus on taboo and stigmatised topics in women’s health. This includes events and conferences on women’s health

2. Funding programmes for research on women’s health and reproduction will continue to flourish

3. A greater variety of B2B solutions in the femtech industry

“We will see industry players rethinking existing and established markets, while others explore completely uncharted or ‘white space’ opportunities,” the report closed.

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Singapore-based business financing company Right Choice Capital has received approval to acquire Rural Bank of San Luis (RBSL).

RBSL is a fully licensed rural bank in the Pampanga region of the Philippines with a 50-year successful operating history. It provides savings, time deposits and lending to MSMEs and individual consumers.

The acquisition is part of Right Choice Capital’s broader banking roll-up strategy, with another bank acquisition currently under negotiation.

“We are expanding RBSL bank with a fully digital product range while retaining its personalised, relationship-driven core business for MSME and individual customers,” Right Choice Capital CEO and Founder Kodi Kodrowski said.

Also Read: Are startups neglecting the future middle-class population in Philippines?

In addition, Right Choice Capital is currently raising US$10 million towards its Series A equity round from undisclosed investors. It plans to use the capital being raised to support its rapid scaling and expects to acquire additional bank & financial services businesses during Q1 and Q2 of 2023.

“We started as a regulated finance corporation six years ago and have steadily added multiple licensed business units, including remittances, SaaS, knowledge-process outsourcing, and merchant acquisition (card services) business,” he added.

“This is all part of building out a fully diversified FinServices Group with a complete range of services for the still underserved SME, MSME and consumer market sectors in the region,” shared Kodrowski.

Right Choice Capital is the Singapore parent company for the group’s financial services and banking entities in Singapore and the Philippines. The diversified financial services group has approximately 100 employees across ten office branches in the Philippines and Singapore.

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