Shopee, Lazada are laying the ground for AI shopping agents. Is a brutal price war looming?

RELYING on artificial intelligence (AI) for gift selection this holiday season may be a stretch, but the e-commerce industry’s move towards AI shopping agents now looks inevitable as OpenAI, Perplexity, Google and Amazon race to build their own.

South-east Asia doesn’t have a fully fledged AI shopping agent yet, but companies are already laying the groundwork.

Shopee has been working with OpenAI since early this year to explore how AI agents could be used on its platform. Lazada, meanwhile, claimed that its AI chatbot, Lazzie, has already helped drive sales.