Before a Vietnamese shopper adds anything to a cart these days, there is a good chance a chatbot has been consulted. As many as 62 per cent of Vietnamese buyers use AI, including generative AI, to research purchases before they buy, according to a new survey by Ho Chi Minh City-based market research firm Q&Me.
Only 3 per cent of respondents said they “never” use AI for pre-purchase research. Frequent use peaks among people in their 30s (68 per cent), while those in their 40s are more likely to say they use it “sometimes” (44 per cent).
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On the surface, it is another data point for the thesis that AI chats are becoming the new starting point for online shopping. Read the rest of the survey, though, and a more nuanced picture emerges: AI has joined the shopping journey, but it has not taken it over.
The old guard still runs the funnel
When respondents were asked which research methods they actually use, generative AI came in fifth, cited by 58 per cent. Search engines such as Google led with 86 per cent, followed by e-commerce platforms such as Shopee and Lazada (77 per cent), Facebook (59 per cent) and TikTok (57 per cent).
In other words, the chatbot has become one more tab among many rather than a replacement for them. A typical Vietnamese buyer is likely to ask ChatGPT what to look for, check Google for reviews, compare prices on Shopee, and watch a TikTok creator unbox the product before paying. That fragmentation is a headache for brands, which now have to show up credibly in all five places.
It also matters for the platforms. TikTok, which is investing US$980 million in a logistics project in Ho Chi Minh City, is betting that discovery and checkout happen in the same app. A shopper, who does the thinking inside a chatbot and only arrives at the marketplace to pay, weakens that bet, and hands the most valuable part of the funnel — the moment of consideration — to someone else.
What people actually ask the bots
Shopping is not even the main reason Vietnamese users turn to generative AI. According to Q&Me, 78 per cent use it for information search, 62 per cent for personal advice, 58 per cent for product research and 57 per cent for work tasks.
The information-search figure is the one to watch. Chatbots are increasingly doing the job search engines used to do, a shift regulators elsewhere are starting to notice; Europe’s decision to classify ChatGPT as a search engine is one sign of where that leads. For shoppers, the risk is that a confident-sounding answer replaces a comparison. Product data feeding AI systems is often incomplete or simply wrong, and a chatbot rarely tells a buyer when it is guessing.
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The 62 per cent seeking personal advice deserves its own caution. Advice on what to buy shades quickly into advice on whether to buy, and few of these tools disclose how products end up in their recommendations.
ChatGPT leads, Google closes in
Among generative AI services, ChatGPT is the clear leader, used by 80 per cent of respondents, followed by Gemini (68 per cent) and Meta AI (25 per cent). Claude, Copilot, DeepSeek, Grok and Perplexity trailed behind.
Gemini’s strong second place is no accident. Google has been pushing hard on distribution and local-language capability across Southeast Asia, and it owns both the Android phones most Vietnamese carry and the search engine 86 per cent still rely on.
Meta AI’s 25 per cent, by contrast, looks modest given how deeply Facebook is woven into Vietnamese commerce, which suggests users have not yet learned to treat the assistant inside their social feed as a shopping adviser.
Notably absent from the list of popular services is any homegrown Vietnamese assistant, despite the country’s ambitions to become a regional AI builder and a growing body of work on models trained for Vietnamese, Thai and Indonesian. Vietnamese consumers, for now, are doing their AI-assisted shopping on American platforms.
Read the fine print
The survey’s headline numbers should be handled with care. Q&Me polled just 200 men and women aged 20 to 49 in Ho Chi Minh City and Hanoi. A sample that size carries a margin of error of roughly seven percentage points either way, and the age-group splits are drawn from smaller pools still, so the gap between people in their 30s and 40s may be narrower or wider than it looks.
The sample is also urban, working-age and, almost by definition, online, which is exactly the slice of Vietnam most likely to have embraced AI. It says little about older shoppers or buyers outside the two biggest cities, where much of the next wave of e-commerce growth is expected to come from.
There is a definitional wrinkle too. The survey says 62 per cent use AI for pre-purchase research, yet only 58 per cent name generative AI as one of their research methods, and the same 58 per cent use it for product research. The difference may come down to how respondents interpreted “AI”: some may be counting the AI features already built into search results and shopping apps rather than a standalone chatbot.
What it means for brands and founders
None of this undercuts the direction of travel. Even with a small sample, near-universal exposure among urban buyers is a strong signal, and the 30-something cohort, the one with the most purchasing power, is the heaviest user.
For brands selling into Vietnam, the practical lesson is that being findable now means being legible to machines as well as to people: accurate product data, consistent reviews and clear specifications that a chatbot can parse and repeat. For startups, the gap is in the middle of the funnel, building tools that help merchants show up correctly inside AI answers, and that help shoppers verify what those answers tell them.
Also Read: Why Singapore, Indonesia, and Vietnam are losing the AI race they think they are winning
For now, Vietnamese shoppers are using AI the way they use a well-read friend: worth asking, rarely the final word. Google, Shopee and TikTok still close the sale. The question for the next survey is how long that lasts.
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