The Ecommerce Map Is Being Redrawn: Agentic Commerce and the Future of Buying in SEA
NYBROO INSIGHTS
May 20, 2026
New brands are born selling online. Older retailers still bolt e-commerce onto physical distribution. The real difference isn't revenue split — it's whether the business runs on one shared truth.
Key Takeaways
Final Insights fon Agentic Commerce
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AI agents are starting to transact directly on a shopper's behalf, bypassing ads, product photography, and browsing entirely — and the payment rails to support it, like Visa Intelligent Commerce and Mastercard Agent Pay, already exist.
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OpenAI's own pullback from in-chat checkout confirms the pattern to plan around: discovery may increasingly live inside someone else's AI, but the purchase, and the data attached to it, belongs on the brand's own site.
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Platforms are already building their own agent layers, not just theorising about it — Shopee's ChatGPT integration across six SEA markets shows marketplace dependence now means depending on someone else's agent relationship, not just their storefront.
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The region-specific opportunity is agent-to-chat and agent-to-video commerce through WhatsApp, LINE, and TikTok, not just agent-to-website — the brands that adapt fastest will treat their own site as the data layer, marketplaces as discovery, and owned channels as where the customer relationship is kept.
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SOURCES
• Buy it in ChatGPT: Instant Checkout and the Agentic Commerce Protocol — OpenAI
• Why AI Checkout Stalled: Discover in AI, Buy on Site — Digital Applied
• Meta Business Agent: WhatsApp's AI Seller Faces Its SEA Test — Tech Wire Asia
• LINE's AI Agents Point to Messaging Apps Becoming Sales Channels — Marketing Tech News
• Mastercard Launches Agent Pay for Machines — Mastercard Newsroom
• Visa, OpenAI Work Together to Support Agent-Led Payments — Digital Commerce 360
For the past decade, the ecommerce debate in Southeast Asia has been fairly simple: Shopee and Lazada own the eyeballs, Tokopedia and TikTok Shop are reshaping the middle, and selling online means playing by the platforms' rules — their algorithms, promo calendars, fees, and data. Brands either build their own channel alongside it, or accept they are a tenant in someone else's building.
That calculus is unlikely to hold much longer, and most brands in the region are not yet thinking about why. Agentic AI — systems that do not just assist buyers but act on their behalf — is starting to redraw where discovery, consideration, and conversion happen. This is no longer a five-years-out story: in the past month, Shopee integrated ChatGPT shopping across seven Southeast Asian markets, Shopify opened agent-native commerce to every merchant, and Salesforce shipped its biggest agent commerce release yet. The map is moving in real time.
What agentic commerce actually means
'Agentic commerce' describes AI agents — systems that reason, plan, and take action — handling purchasing tasks on a human's behalf. An agentic system knows a buyer's preferences, budget, past purchases, and quality bar; when a reorder is needed, or a new supplier or service required, it doesn't wait for a search bar to act.
The part that matters most: an AI agent shopping on a customer's behalf doesn't browse a marketplace the way a person does. It doesn't respond to a banner ad, or scroll past a beautifully shot image and stop — it queries, compares, filters, and transacts, often without a human ever seeing a product listing. This is no longer hypothetical: Visa and Mastercard have both built tokenised payment rails so a verified agent can complete a purchase on a shopper's card without a human present at checkout, and Mastercard's version, extended in June to cover machine-to-machine purchasing, is called Agent Pay.
A brand that exists only as a platform listing may be invisible to an entire generation of buyers who have delegated their purchasing to systems that do not experience a marketplace presence the way it was designed.
"If an AI agent is shopping on a customer's behalf, is the brand even in the room? Most ecommerce businesses in SEA do not have an answer yet."
Why the brand's own site just became more important
The case for a direct-to-consumer channel has been made many times — brand control, customer data, margin. Most brands in SEA have heard the argument and invested partially, while keeping the bulk of volume on platforms, because that is where customers are.
The clearest evidence: OpenAI, which arguably started this conversation, built in-chat checkout inside ChatGPT last year and pulled back from it this year. Its own conclusion, as of mid-2026: people want to discover products inside the AI conversation, but the purchase happens back on the merchant's own site, where the merchant keeps the experience and the data. That is the split brands should plan around — discovery may increasingly live inside somebody else's AI; the transaction doesn't have to.
Shopify has made this concrete: its latest release auto-syncs every merchant's catalogue into a structured format ChatGPT, Copilot, and Google can read directly, built on the Universal Commerce Protocol co-developed with Google, with a dashboard controlling which AI channels can see products and complete checkout. That is machine readability, productised — a well-structured site with clean data and a reliable purchase flow is an asset an agent can transact through. A marketplace listing, by contrast, is queryable only on the platform's terms, with the platform capturing the transaction data. The long-term risk of marketplace dependence is no longer just fees or algorithm changes; it is becoming a commodity input in someone else's commerce engine.
But marketplaces are not going anywhere
The dominant platforms in SEA are not standing still. For discovery-led categories — fashion, beauty, lifestyle, home goods — human browsing remains the primary mode of purchase, and platforms serve it exceptionally well; the serendipity of finding something unexpected, and the social proof of reviews, are not things an agent replicates soon.
The proof is not far off: in the same few weeks, Shopee — under parent company Sea — struck a direct partnership with OpenAI and became the first platform to offer ChatGPT shopping simultaneously across Southeast Asia and Latin America, live now in Thailand, Vietnam, Indonesia, Malaysia, the Philippines, and Singapore. This matches the pattern above: a platform building its own agent layer, on its own terms, sitting in the middle of the relationship. A brand selling on Shopee can already be recommended by an AI agent through ChatGPT — whether it has any leverage in that exchange is a separate question, and for now the answer is not much.
The SEA difference
Agentic commerce in Southeast Asia will not look like the model emerging in the US or Europe: the infrastructure, consumer behaviour, and channels that matter are all different.
This is already visible close to home. Meta's WhatsApp seller agent went live globally last month, landing hardest in the markets where it matters most — Malaysian and Indonesian small businesses that have run their sales process through a WhatsApp admin typing prices and confirming stock by hand for years. LINE has rolled out its own agent system in Thailand, already live inside LINE MAN Wongnai, automating customer service and sales conversations that used to sit with a person. None of this looks like a standalone shopping app — it is agentic commerce arriving inside the chat thread people already use, meaning the opportunity is agent-to-chat and agent-to-video-commerce, not just agent-to-website.
The strategic position for brands today
None of this requires abandoning what is working. The layered position worth taking now:
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Build the brand's own site as its data layer and machine-readable asset — clean taxonomy, consistent metadata, structured catalogue feeds.
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Use marketplaces for volume and discovery. They remain excellent at it — Shopee's ChatGPT integration proves the discovery layer is only getting stronger. Treat marketplaces as top-of-funnel acquisition, not the permanent home of the customer relationship.
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Own the post-purchase relationship — WhatsApp, LINE, email, whichever channel fits the market. The agent economy may end up controlling where the first purchase happens; it does not have to control what happens after.
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Watch where the platforms are building. Shopee's OpenAI deal, Shopify's Universal Commerce Protocol rollout, and Salesforce's agent commerce release landed within weeks of each other — that clustering is the clearest signal of which way the wind is blowing.
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Get checkout agent-ready and build first-party data now. Visa and Mastercard have already built the rails — Visa Intelligent Commerce, Mastercard Agent Pay — for a verified agent to complete a purchase without a human at checkout. Every customer transacting through an owned channel is a data point the brand keeps; every one transacting only through a marketplace has to be paid for again.
The ecommerce brands that thrive in the agentic era will not be the ones that called the technology correctly, but the ones that noticed, in real time, that the rules of visibility and customer relationships were changing — and built the foundations under them before they had to.
The map is being redrawn. The advantage goes to whoever draws their own first.