For years, digital wealth platforms in Southeast Asia have focused on helping users do one thing better: invest. They lowered account minimums, simplified portfolios, and made cash management and ETFs available through an app. StashAway now wants to move into a less glamorous but arguably more consequential part of the wealth journey: what happens to that money when its owner dies.

The Singapore-headquartered digital investment platform has acquired MakeGoodwill, a local digital wills platform that lets Singapore residents create a will online in about an hour. The terms of the deal were not disclosed. MakeGoodwill will continue to operate as a standalone brand.

Also Read: Digital wealth platforms hit scale in SEA as foreign investing apps outgrow local rivals

The acquisition marks StashAway’s first formal move beyond wealth accumulation into legacy planning. Since its launch in 2017, the company has built its business around cash management, managed portfolios, do-it-yourself ETF investing and alternative investments, including private markets. It now operates in Singapore, Malaysia, Hong Kong, the UAE and Thailand, and says it manages billions of dollars in assets.

The move comes as consumer fintechs face a more mature market. Robo-advisory and digital investing are no longer as novel as they were five years ago and platforms are looking for ways to deepen relationships with clients beyond portfolio performance. Estate planning, while less headline-grabbing than private credit or AI-driven investing, is one of the clearest adjacent needs.

“Our clients spend years building wealth for a better future, often with their families in mind. Yet many never plan how to protect that wealth and pass it on,” said Michele Ferrario, co-founder and CEO of StashAway. “Bringing MakeGoodwill into StashAway means we can support clients through some of their most important financial decisions, from investing to planning their legacy.”

The will gap

The numbers explain why StashAway is interested. According to a YouGov study cited by the company, only 22 per cent of Singaporeans have a legally drafted will. StashAway’s own survey of 125 clients, conducted in March 2026, found a similar gap among people already building wealth: three in four had no will. Among those who did, more than 40 per cent said their will was out of date.

The survey is small and limited to StashAway clients, but the findings reflect a broader behavioural problem. People know estate planning matters, but they delay it because it feels uncomfortable, complicated or expensive. More than eight in 10 respondents cited barriers such as procrastination, lack of time or uncertainty over what a will should include. At the same time, nine in 10 said they would create a will within three months if the process were simpler.

That gap between intention and action is exactly where digital platforms tend to position themselves. MakeGoodwill uses guided questions in plain language to help users generate a will based on a template developed by Singapore lawyers. Users then need to print and sign the document in the presence of two independent witnesses for it to be legally valid.

The platform has helped create more than 1,100 wills since launch. It is not a law firm and does not provide legal advice, a distinction that matters in estate planning. Its documents are designed to comply with Singapore’s Wills Act 1838, Probate and Administration Act 1934 and relevant case law, but people with complex family structures, cross-border assets, business holdings or disputes may still need legal counsel.

Lowering the cost of basic planning

MakeGoodwill charges S$179 (~US$132) to create a will. The company says traditional law firms typically charge between SGD500 and SGD1,500 for similar services. The platform includes client support at no extra cost, with questions answered within 24 hours on working days.

Each will comes with one year of unlimited edits, secure lifetime access to completed documents, and a 30-day money-back guarantee. After the first year, users can pay SGD35 annually to keep editing their will as their family, assets or circumstances change. Couples can add a second will for SGD89.50.

Also Read: ‘Resistance to digital wealth management has almost disappeared in SEA’: Bambu CEO Ned Phillips

That ability to update documents may prove important. A will is not a one-off administrative chore. It can become outdated after marriage, divorce, the birth of children, the purchase of property, changes in beneficiaries or changes in financial assets. The rise of digital investing has also made estates more fragmented, with people holding cash accounts, ETFs, crypto, private market exposure and overseas investments across multiple platforms.

“The best products cut through complexity and make things simple enough to act on,” said Priya Surya, founder of Goodwill, now MakeGoodwill. “We started Goodwill so anyone could create a legally valid estate plan in minutes instead of putting it off for years.”

For StashAway, the acquisition adds a practical layer to its brand promise. Wealth platforms often talk about long-term goals, retirement and family security. A will brings that conversation into sharper focus because it asks clients to specify who receives their assets, rather than leaving the matter to intestacy rules.

A Southeast Asian context

Singapore is a logical starting point for this kind of product. It has high household wealth, rising digital finance adoption and a relatively clear legal framework for wills. It also has a large population of globally mobile professionals who may own assets across jurisdictions, though MakeGoodwill’s current product is designed around Singapore law.

Across Southeast Asia, the legacy-planning gap is likely even wider. In many markets, families still depend on informal arrangements, verbal wishes or assumptions about inheritance. That can create disputes, delays and financial stress when someone dies. The issue becomes more complicated as middle-class households accumulate more financial assets, property and insurance, often across multiple providers.

Digital wills will not solve every estate-planning problem. Inheritance law, religious law, tax considerations and cross-border assets can be complex. Muslim inheritance, for example, may require different planning considerations in markets such as Malaysia and Indonesia. But for straightforward cases, a low-cost digital tool could help more people take a first step rather than avoid the topic entirely.

Rivals and the broader wealth race

StashAway’s closest regional rivals include Endowus and Syfe in Singapore’s digital wealth market, as well as other investment platforms and private banking alternatives competing for affluent retail and mass affluent users. Endowus has leaned heavily into access to funds, CPF and SRS investing, and advisory-led wealth management, while Syfe has built products around managed portfolios, brokerage and cash solutions. Banks such as DBS, OCBC and UOB also compete through increasingly digital wealth offerings, with the advantage of existing customer relationships.

The MakeGoodwill deal gives StashAway a different angle: instead of only adding more investment products, it is extending into financial administration around death, family and asset transfer.

The acquisition also reflects a wider shift in fintech. As customer acquisition becomes more expensive, platforms are trying to increase lifetime value by serving more use cases. For digital wealth players, that may mean retirement income, insurance, tax planning, estate planning or private markets. The winners will not necessarily be those with the longest product menu, but those that can make adjacent services simple without overstepping into areas that require regulated advice.

Also Read: Wealthtech, insurtech, SaaS fintech are the new hot verticals in Indonesia: AC Ventures report

StashAway’s challenge will be to integrate legacy planning without making it feel like another upsell inside an investment app. Wills are sensitive. They involve family relationships, mortality and trust. A clumsy user experience could undermine the very simplicity the acquisition is meant to deliver.

Still, the logic is clear. If digital wealth platforms have persuaded users to build portfolios online, the next phase is helping them organise what those portfolios are for. In a region where more people are investing but far fewer have planned how their assets should be passed on, StashAway’s acquisition of MakeGoodwill is a sign that wealthtech is moving from accumulation to continuity.

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For much of the last decade, agritech startups in emerging markets were sold on a seductive idea: millions of smallholder farmers, armed with smartphones, would pay for software that helped them farm better. Investors liked the story because it sounded scalable. Build once, distribute widely, grow user numbers fast.

The problem was that the model rarely matched life on the ground.

Across emerging markets, including Southeast Asia, smallholder farmers may need better information, but they are often juggling more urgent constraints: access to affordable inputs, reliable buyers, working capital, weather shocks and unstable prices. A standalone app asking them to pay for advice was rarely competing with another app. It was competing with fertiliser, labour, transport, school fees and debt repayments.

Also Read: Why Indonesia’s agritech winners will be phygital, not purely digital

That mismatch has become harder to ignore since the global funding correction that began in 2022, according to the “AgTech Investment in Emerging Markets 2025” report prepared by AgBase, Briter, and Mercy Corps. As venture capital became scarcer, agritech companies could no longer rely on user registrations or app downloads as proof of progress. Investors started asking a more basic question: who is actually paying, and why?

The answer increasingly points downstream.

Rather than charging farmers directly, a new generation of agritech models is shifting monetisation towards buyers, processors, retailers, exporters and agribusiness corporates. These companies have stronger balance sheets and clearer incentives to pay for tools that improve traceability, climate resilience, supply visibility and compliance. In other words, the farmer remains central to the system, but no longer has to carry the full cost of digitisation.

The limits of farmer-paid software

The old “agri-SaaS” model borrowed too heavily from Western enterprise software. It assumed that smallholders would behave like corporate clients: subscribe, log in regularly, use dashboards and renew. But agriculture in emerging markets is not a neatly digitised office environment. It is fragmented, seasonal, trust-based and physically demanding.

There are an estimated 500 million smallholder farmers across emerging markets. Many operate on thin margins and face risks they cannot control, from droughts and floods to volatile commodity prices. In such a setting, software that addresses only one part of the value chain struggles to become indispensable.

For agritech platforms, the lesson has been blunt. Digital tools need to be bundled with tangible services: input supply, credit, insurance, market access, logistics or guaranteed offtake. Without solving these practical pain points, even useful apps can fail to generate recurring usage, let alone subscription revenue.

This is especially true in Southeast Asia, where agricultural supply chains can be highly localised. A rice farmer in Vietnam, a chilli grower in Indonesia and a durian producer in Malaysia may all benefit from better data, but their routes to market, financing options and buyer relationships differ sharply. A single digital product rarely fits all.

From venture bets to system bets

The funding environment has accelerated this shift. During the pre-2022 liquidity boom, many agritech startups were rewarded for reach. Growth decks highlighted registered farmers, hectares covered or villages reached. Those metrics were not meaningless, but they often obscured weak retention, low willingness to pay and expensive field operations.

Also Read: Agritech does not empower women farmers, until the system is fixed

By 2025, the bar has moved. Investors are looking for active usage, stronger unit economics and clearer paths to profitability. They are also more aware that agritech in emerging markets often requires mixed forms of capital. Concessional funding, donor money, commercial equity and corporate partnerships may all be needed to build infrastructure around farmers before a business becomes scalable.

This is a more disciplined phase for the sector. It also means founders must understand what some analysts call the “investable frontier”: the point at which a market’s infrastructure, regulation, logistics and buyer maturity make certain business models viable.

In a more developed agricultural export market, a startup may be able to build a relatively asset-light coordination layer on top of existing logistics and buyer networks. In a less mature market, the same company may need to build warehouses, aggregation centres, transport routes or agent networks before its software has any commercial value.

That difference matters. It explains why copying a model from one region to another often fails. Southeast Asia’s agritech opportunity is not the same as Africa’s, India’s or Latin America’s. Even within the region, Thailand’s export-oriented agriculture, Indonesia’s archipelagic logistics and the Philippines’ fragmented farming base require different operating models.

Why corporates are becoming the payer

Downstream monetisation works because it follows the money. Large agribusinesses, food manufacturers and retailers face growing pressure to know where their products come from, how they are produced and whether supply can withstand climate disruption.

Traceability is no longer a nice-to-have. Export markets are tightening rules on deforestation, labour standards, carbon reporting and food safety. Buyers need better farm-level data to comply with those standards. They also need visibility to protect their own margins when floods, droughts or disease threaten supply.

That creates an opening for agritech startups. Instead of selling generic advice to farmers, they can sell verified data and operational tools to corporates: supply chain transparency, water-efficiency monitoring, carbon measurement, sustainability reporting and quality assurance.

In Southeast Asia, this is particularly relevant for commodities tied to global supply chains, including palm oil, coffee, cocoa, rice, seafood, fruit and rubber. Export-oriented buyers need evidence that production meets increasingly strict standards. Startups that can gather, verify and translate farm-level information into compliance-ready data may find more reliable revenue from buyers than from farmers.

The commercial logic is simple. A farmer may not pay for a traceability dashboard. A multinational buyer facing regulatory risk, reputational damage or supply disruption might.

The return of physical operations

The shift downstream does not mean agritech can become purely digital. If anything, it reinforces the need for “phygital” models: digital systems supported by physical operations and human relationships.

Also Read: From Lagos to Jakarta: Why SEA agritech needs Africa’s “boots on the ground” playbook

Agriculture still depends on trust. Farmers need to know who is buying, when payment will arrive, whether inputs are genuine and whether advice is credible. Buyers need confidence that produce quality, volumes and sustainability claims are real. That cannot be solved by code alone.

The most durable models often combine software with field agents, collection points, logistics partners, financing channels or buyer aggregation facilities. In Southeast Asia, startups may be able to use infrastructure already built by cooperatives, distributors, government agencies or large corporates. That allows for more asset-light coordination than in markets where startups must build the “hard rails” themselves.

Digital public infrastructure can also help. Land registries, digital identity systems, e-wallets and government farm databases can reduce the cost of farmer verification, credit scoring and payments. But access to these rails varies widely across the region, which again makes local market design critical.

Impact as unit economics

The new agritech discipline also changes how impact is understood. It is no longer a separate slide at the end of a pitch deck. In smallholder markets, impact often determines whether the business works at all.

If a platform does not improve farmer income, reduce risk or open access to better markets, farmers churn. If a financing product does not bundle insurance, agronomic support or guaranteed offtake, repayment risk rises. The source material suggests that farmer income gains of 20 per cent to 30 per cent may be needed to materially lower churn and build long-term loyalty. Agri-finance models that combine insurance or guaranteed offtake can maintain repayment rates above 95 per cent.

These figures point to a bigger truth: farmer prosperity and startup sustainability are linked. Extractive models fail because they weaken the very supply base they depend on. Stronger models make farmers more productive and less risky, which in turn makes the platform more valuable to lenders, insurers and buyers.

The climate transition as business model

Climate change is likely to make downstream monetisation even more important. Food companies need to secure supply in a world of rising heat, water stress and extreme weather. Governments and regulators are demanding more transparent reporting. Investors are pushing companies to show credible sustainability progress.

Agritech startups that can help corporates measure emissions, manage water use, verify regenerative practices or protect yields will be better positioned than those selling narrow farm-management apps. Biological inputs, satellite monitoring, soil data, carbon accounting and AI-based advisory tools may all have a role, but only if they connect to a paying customer with a real commercial problem.

Also Read: The future of farming in the Asia Pacific is here to empower farmers

The era of vanity metrics is ending. Agritech’s next phase will be judged less by how many farmers download an app and more by whether the company can build a working system around them.

For Southeast Asia, that may be good news. The region’s agricultural sector is fragmented, but it is also deeply connected to global food, commodity and export markets. Startups that can bridge smallholder production with corporate demand for transparency, resilience and sustainability may finally find a path to durable revenue.

The lesson is not that farmers do not matter. It is that charging them directly for software was often the wrong place to start. The future of agritech profitability may depend on helping farmers create more value, while asking those who capture larger margins downstream to pay for the tools that make the system work.

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For years, Southeast Asia’s battery ambitions have been framed around potential. Indonesia has nickel. Malaysia has semiconductor and advanced materials expertise. Singapore has research depth and capital networks. Thailand and Vietnam have growing electric vehicle supply chains. The Philippines is trying to build a stronger EV ecosystem of its own.

At the 4th ASEAN Battery Technology Conference in Malaysia this week, the discussion shifted towards a more difficult question: can these separate strengths be turned into an integrated regional industry?

Also Read: Southeast Asia’s EV startups draw US$622M as clean mobility shifts from pitch to pilot

Held from 19 to 21 August at the Mövenpick Hotel & Convention Centre KLIA in Sepang, ABTC 2026 brings together policymakers, manufacturers, researchers, investors and industry groups from across the region. Hosted by NanoMalaysia Berhad, the conference is themed “Industrialising Battery Technologies: Strengthening ASEAN’s Battery Value Chain for Global Competitiveness”.

That wording matters. The region is no longer talking only about research collaboration or EV adoption targets. It is now confronting the industrial layer behind the energy transition: battery materials, cell development, safety testing, certification, manufacturing scale-up, recycling and market deployment.

Opening the conference, Malaysia’s Minister of Science, Technology and Innovation, YB Datuk Chang Lih Kang, said ASEAN must move “from discussion to industrialisation”.

“ASEAN’s strength lies in our ability to complement one another through research, manufacturing, standards development, investment, and market integration. By working together, we can build a resilient regional value chain that benefits all our economies,” he said.

The challenge is that battery manufacturing is capital-intensive, technically demanding and highly sensitive to scale. China dominates much of the global battery supply chain, from processing to cell production. South Korea and Japan remain major players in advanced battery technologies, while the US and Europe are using industrial policy to localise parts of the chain. ASEAN’s opportunity is real, but it will depend on whether the region can coordinate rather than duplicate efforts across ten fragmented markets.

Malaysia positions itself as a battery industrialisation hub

Malaysia’s role as host reflects its own attempt to move battery research closer to commercial production.

Through initiatives such as the NanoMalaysia Energy Storage Technology Initiative and the Hydrogen–EV–Battery Centre, the country has been building capabilities in research, prototyping, testing, validation and pilot-scale manufacturing. More recent developments, including the establishment of GigaFactory Malaysia Sdn Bhd and Malaysia’s graphene-enhanced lithium-ion battery technology, point to an effort to convert laboratory work into industrial capability.

For Southeast Asia, this matters because the battery economy will not be built by raw materials alone. While Indonesia’s nickel reserves have attracted global attention, the broader value chain includes cathode materials, cell design, battery management systems, pack assembly, safety certification, second-life applications and recycling. Countries that can occupy several points along this chain will have a better chance of retaining value locally.

Prof. (Adj.) Dr Rezal Khairi Ahmad, CEO of NMB Group, said the region already has technical capabilities, but needs clearer pathways to scale.

“Malaysia has been building the infrastructure to move technologies from research into pilot and industrial application, but no single market can build the battery economy alone,” he said. “ABTC gives us the opportunity to connect capabilities across ASEAN, develop stronger cross-border pathways and collectively build an industry that can compete globally.”

Also Read: Grab invests in EBOOST as Vietnam’s EV charging race shifts into higher gear

That is the central tension facing the region. ASEAN has the ingredients for a battery ecosystem, but ingredients do not automatically become an industry. Investors will look for predictable demand, common standards, skilled talent, bankable offtake agreements and manufacturing discipline. Governments, meanwhile, need to align EV policies, grid storage plans and industrial incentives without turning the sector into a subsidy race.

Malaysia-Indonesia pouch cell points to regional complementarity
One of the most concrete announcements on the opening day was the launch of a Malaysia-Indonesia NMC-graphene lithium-ion pouch cell, developed through collaboration between NanoMalaysia Berhad and Indonesia’s National Battery Research Institute.

NMC refers to lithium-ion battery chemistry using nickel, manganese and cobalt in the cathode. It is widely used in EVs and energy storage because it can offer relatively high energy density, though it also raises questions around cost, raw material sourcing and safety management. Graphene, a highly conductive carbon-based material, is being explored globally to improve battery performance, durability and charging characteristics.

The pouch cell builds on a memorandum of understanding signed by NMB and NBRI during ABTC 2025. That agreement covered technology transfer, joint research and innovation, testing and standardisation, education and industrial training.

In practical terms, the initiative combines Indonesia’s work in NMC active material production with Malaysia’s battery formulation, graphene technology and cell development capabilities. It is a small but useful example of how the region could divide labour: one country need not own the entire stack if cross-border collaboration allows materials, research, testing and eventual commercialisation to connect more efficiently.

For Indonesia, such collaborations could help move its battery strategy beyond mineral extraction. For Malaysia, they offer a route to plug its materials science, electronics and manufacturing experience into a regional supply chain. For ASEAN as a whole, these projects test whether regional cooperation can survive the commercial realities of intellectual property, ownership, standards and market access.

Partnerships signal interest, but execution will decide impact

ABTC 2026 also saw several partnership announcements across battery storage, manufacturing, AI-enabled operations and commercialisation.

GigaFactory Malaysia and Milan Utama signed a supply agreement for prototyping compact battery energy storage systems. Infien Energy and Ampace announced a strategic collaboration to explore opportunities in battery technologies. Green Tenaga and Go Rental Singapore entered a partnership focused on sustainable energy solutions, while Neoron Energy Network, Aryva Energy, Nano Commerce and GigaFactory Malaysia formed a collaboration to develop and commercialise battery and energy storage solutions.

GigaFactory Malaysia also announced separate initiatives with Axium Industries and Montavista Energy Technologies Corporation. The Axium partnership is aimed at using AI and digital tools to improve battery manufacturing, operational efficiency and supply chain management. The Montavista collaboration focuses on high-energy-density battery innovation, recycling, manufacturing capabilities, equipment facilitation and market development.

Such agreements are common at industry conferences, and not all will translate into factories, revenue or exportable products. Still, they indicate where the region’s battery conversation is heading. Energy storage is becoming as important as EVs, particularly as Southeast Asian countries add more solar and renewable power to their grids. Battery energy storage systems can help manage intermittency, stabilise grids and support decentralised energy models for factories, commercial buildings and remote communities.

Safety and certification will also become more important as batteries move from pilot projects into homes, vehicles, factories and grid infrastructure. The conference’s opening sessions included discussions on battery safety, manufacturing scale-up, circularity and emerging technologies, with speakers from Argonne National Laboratory, the University of Chicago, SEDA, MARii, Pertamina, A*STAR and the Electric Vehicle Association of the Philippines.

From conference circuit to industrial policy

ABTC has evolved quickly since its first edition in Bali in 2023. Subsequent editions were held in Singapore and Phuket, with the 2026 event in Malaysia and the 2027 edition set to be hosted by the Electric Vehicle Association of the Philippines. Along the way, the platform has supported regional industry coordination, including an ASEAN battery associations memorandum in 2023 and the ASEAN Battery Safety Network in 2025.

The handover to the Philippines is symbolic, but the bigger test lies outside the conference hall. Southeast Asia’s battery ambitions will depend on whether countries can coordinate standards, train engineers and technicians, attract long-term capital, support recycling and create enough domestic demand to justify manufacturing investment.

The global battery race is moving fast. ASEAN does not need to replicate China’s scale to be relevant, but it does need to be clear about where it can compete. That may be in selected materials, specialised manufacturing, pack assembly, battery management systems, energy storage deployment, testing and certification, or recycling.

Also Read: Inside Thailand’s EV and battery push: Balancing growth with sustainability

The shift from dialogue to industrialisation is therefore less a slogan than a deadline. If Southeast Asia wants to capture more value from the EV and energy storage boom, the next phase will be measured not by memoranda signed, but by plants built, products certified and batteries deployed in real markets.

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Southeast Asia is piloting AI faster than almost anywhere else in the world. But how do you turn that pilot-phase momentum into real, enterprise-wide value? It forces a hard look at your data, your architecture, and the new operational risks.

Southeast Asia isn’t catching up on artificial intelligence; in many respects, it’s actually setting the pace. A study by McKinsey and the Singapore Economic Development Board revealed that 8 percent of companies in the region have fully scaled AI initiatives – edging out the 6 percent global average. Frontrunners like Singapore (56 percent) and Indonesia (51 percent) are already reporting meaningful progress toward region-wide implementation.

Yet, retail occupies a starkly split position within this landscape. More than half (56 percent) of consumer goods and retail enterprises across ASEAN remain locked in continuous piloting and experimentation. They are caught in a web of fragmented data environments, divergent cross-border regulations, and a persistent scarcity of AI-ready talent.

However, this scale and implementation hurdle isn’t unique to Asia. Global research shows that nearly three-quarters of retail AI initiatives fail to reach production, while close to half of all broader enterprise AI proofs-of-concept are scrapped before scaling.

What is unique to Southeast Asia is the shape of the opportunity: a young, mobile-first population accustomed to super-apps, paired with retail infrastructure that rarely carries the weight of rigid, legacy systems such as mainframes found in Western markets.

Having spent years designing the data and AI architecture for large-scale retail deployments globally, I’ve learned that the pilot-to-production gap is rarely a math problem. It’s a systems problem. What thrives in a controlled lab environment seldom survives contact with the chaotic realities of a multi-market retail operation.

Where AI pilots break first

A pilot succeeds precisely because it’s small, it generally focuses on one market, one dataset and one motivated team. None of those conditions hold once a retailer tries to roll the same model out across Vietnam, Indonesia, the Philippines, and Thailand at once.

Data is usually the first casualty

Imagine this: A brilliant demand-forecasting model perfected on clean, structured data in Singapore immediately sputters when confronted with Indonesia’s point-of-sale formats, Vietnam’s informal retail networks, or varying definitions of what constitutes a “completed transaction.” Across industries, roughly 85 percent of AI project failures trace back to poor data quality rather than the frontier model itself. In Southeast Asia – where modern trade, traditional trade (like warungs and sari-sari stores), and social commerce intersect, this data friction is particularly acute than in more homogenous markets.

The second casualty is strategic clarity and a clear definition of success

Retail AI projects that get scrapped often never had one to begin with. A staggering 73 per cent of failed initiatives lacked quantified success criteria from the start. Vague mandates such as “Improve customer personalisation” isn’t a target. A target like “reduce category-specific stockouts by 4.5 per cent across Tier-2 regional hubs” gives the engineering team an actual goal to track and build towards. More importantly, this means – this has the business stakeholder buy-in.

Also Read: Where AI money is made, and where SEA founders should actually compete

Designing for fragmentation, not against it

Let’s face it! Southeast Asia’s retail landscape is largely fragmented – by national borders, regulations, payment rails, language and new consumer habits. Rather than treating this diversity as a temporary friction to be ironed out later, retailers that are scaling AI successfully design their tech stacks around it from day one.

This is part of why multi-cloud and hybrid approaches have become the default in enterprise AI. Most large enterprises globally now run AI workloads across more than one cloud provider, largely to avoid the single point of failure (and the single point of pricing leverage) that comes with full dependency on one vendor. A recent CIO survey found more than a third of enterprises are now running five or more AI models in production, and a separate research found that close to three in four enterprises expect severe business disruption if a single AI vendor’s service were interrupted.

For an ASEAN retailer running real-time inventory and pricing decisions across several ASEAN markets at once, often with different data residency rules in each, that dependency is an existential continuity risk. Designing for portability – using cloud-agnostic data pipelines, open-standard interfaces, and flexible workload deployment – requires a higher upfront effort and investment. However, it guarantees that when data sovereignty rules change in Jakarta or a newer model emerges in Singapore, the business can adapt without rebuilding its core infrastructure from scratch.

Governance at the speed of autonomous scale

When your AI is running a small pilot, governance is easy, because the blast radius is tiny. But at a regional scale, an autonomous AI system might be dynamically setting prices, generating localised promotional content, or auto-issuing purchase orders across hundreds of storefronts simultaneously. Suddenly, you need a new kind of operating manual to ensure it doesn’t go off the rails.

Southeast Asia’s regulatory landscape is moving quickly but unevenly. Singapore and Vietnam have established some of the region’s first comprehensive, risk-based AI frameworks, while other markets are still catching up. Globally, the picture is similar – one 2026 survey of data leaders found that three out of four organisations admit their AI governance hasn’t kept pace with how quickly the technology has been adopted.

The retailers navigating this landscape successfully treat governance as a core operating system rather than a legal checkpoint at the end of a sprint. They assign clear operational ownership for every production model and mandate strict sign-offs before an algorithm interacts with a new country’s customer base.

More importantly, as AI systems move from passive recommendations to direct action – such as re-routing real-time warehouse inventory or approving supplier payouts – the central question changes. It is no longer just “Is this output accurate?” but “Was this the right commercial decision for the brand?”

Also Read: Where AI money is made, and where SEA founders should actually compete

What the region’s first movers are doing differently

None of this is an argument against piloting. It remains the cheapest way to test a hypothesis. What separates the retailers actually scaling AI across Southeast Asia’s fragmented markets is that they treat the pilot as one input into a production decision, not a stand-in for one.

In practice, these organisations share key operational habits: 

• Executive mandate over tactical pilots: C-suite commitment in high-performing ASEAN enterprises is nearly double that of their peers. Clear evidence that scaling AI requires senior leadership to move beyond approving budgets and take direct ownership of operational change management.
• Prioritising the data foundation: They clean and standardise regional data feeds before attempting to scale complex machine learning models. Data architecture is AI architecture.
• Reinventing workflows, not just layering AI on top: The region’s frontrunners are twice as likely to fundamentally redesign entire business processes, from procurement and supply chain routing to store operations, around AI capabilities. They reject the temptation to layer algorithms on top of unchanged, decades-old operating models.
• Architecting for portability: They design systems that comply with local data-residency laws and vendor-neutral pipelines from day one.
• Governance as an operational enabler: High performers are more than twice as likely to embed formal AI governance into their daily operations.
• Empowering local teams: They give field managers and local operators direct agency in redesigning their workflows around AI tools, ensuring systems are actually adopted rather than bypassed.

Southeast Asian retailers possess a rare structural advantage; they are largely unencumbered by decades of rigid legacy IT infrastructure, and they serve a consumer base that adopts digital innovations effortlessly.

Whether that advantage translates into long-term market dominance won’t depend on how many pilots a company launches this quarter; it will depend on whether the underlying architecture can withstand the weight of real scale.

The thoughts shared below and opinions expressed are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect the views, positions, or opinions of his employer or any organisation he is affiliated with.

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Spending the last several months in Southeast Asia allowed me to expand my comprehension of the global market dynamics in times of uncertainty. And bridging global expansion with vibrant hubs, AI exponential adoption and market opportunities closely, I noticed that every market report eventually produces numbers that get quoted everywhere and questioned nowhere.

So, as I always dig deeper than the surface level, I am bringing to you some insights of my experience across SEA markets and the link with Google’s newly released Gemini Report: Southeast Asia 2026.

Two different kinds of “#1”

My first reaction when learning that Singapore is leading the highest AI adoption per capita globally was similar to an unamused emoji; since it is obvious that a market with high internet infrastructure and a ~6M population will get to the top of per capita ranks. I even ran a comparison with top markets of my dominance to see whether that would be applicable. And the results tell us a lot of interesting outputs.

In terms of AI Adoption rate per capita, the UAE ranks #1, which is a very similar market to Singapore when it comes to Internet infrastructure and penetration. A similar vision to embed AI into everyday life and successfully doing so. 

The difference though, is what made Singapore’s stats interesting to me. The UAE has government adoption as the primary source of adopting AI. The position is largely the product of national strategy: sustained government investment in compute infrastructure, sovereign model development, and top-down digital policy. 

In Singapore, the government mandate is also strong, though it is the population that is the driving force behind adoption: a daily behaviour that, on average, shows that Singaporeans prompt Gemini nearly 10 times per day, becoming #1 in the SEA region on daily engagement. 

In this regard, that is an impressive metric to show how the market is embedding AI as part of everyone’s lives. 

Also Read: Where AI money is made, and where SEA founders should actually compete

And comparing metrics on a superficial level misleads decision making because neither figure is wrong — they’re measuring two different growth models, and the distinction is the useful part.

 That’s the distinction I look for in any market I work in: is growth being built by policy, or is it being built by user habit? 

The two require completely different partnership and go-to-market approaches, and combining them is one of the common mistakes companies do in comparing markets to expand. 

SEA region resists a single narrative

The stats reinforce something I’ve long believed about economic blocs specifically: A region with fragmented reality full of cultural and market nuances that influence behavior, consumption and opportunities. Similar to the Middle East, Africa and LATAM. 

How interesting to see that AI adoption takes shape according to market dynamics. Knowing that in the Philippines women account for two-thirds of all micro, small, and medium enterprises, and that they heavily drive neighbourhood economies through home-based ventures, AI tools that help them scale while keeping a lean structure are key for their multi-faceted entrepreneurial journey. Hence, Philippines is the only country in the region where female users are the majority. 

Also Read: How AI helps sales teams stop losing context between calls and follow-ups

In Indonesia, 82 per cent of prompts come from mobile, a pattern that is above SEA’s market average. It reflects the emerging reality of individuals transiting places, having challenging infrastructure and being creative in several ways to make their living. 

Talking about creative ways, a standout pattern comes from Malaysia, where I have been fortunate to spend most of my time in the past months. Collectively, the SEA region accounts for over 5 billion images generated in the past 12 months, and Malaysia leads the rank as 1 in 5 users ask Gemini to generate images. To me, it makes a lot of sense – Malaysia has shown to me how vibrant, colourful and full of life, the country is.

These stats are simply different expressions of how each market is engaging with the same technology, shaped by local digital habits, language, and economic structure. That’s precisely the kind of nuance that gets lost when companies treat “Southeast Asia” as a single go-to-market target rather than a set of markets with their own logic.

Why this matters for your international expansion journey

I find this kind of comparative reading useful well beyond AI adoption. It’s the same discipline I apply when comparing opportunities across emerging markets and global hubs: look past the ranking, understand what’s actually driving the number, and never assume one market’s growth story explains another’s.

For companies planning their expansion and go-to-market strategies — whether from Asia, the Gulf, Europe, or the Americas — that distinction between policy-driven and habit-driven growth is often the difference between a market-entry plan that works and one that just looks good in a slide deck.

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