How will AI disrupt ecommerce in Southeast Asia

Recently the topics of agentic commerce and GEO have surfaced in many discussions we have had with established brands in ecommerce.

The question often boils down to: whether it is worth investing in these, and what is the ROI. In a way, no different from the conversations we have been having over the past decade: Should we invest in ecommerce? Should we invest in livestreaming? Should we invest in affiliates?

And if so, how?

In Momentum Works’s Ecommerce in Southeast Asia 2026 report released last week, our point of view is clear: 

For brands and ecosystem players, while they actively explore agentic commerce and GEO, they ultimately operate within platform-defined boundaries — just that the dominating platforms might be different from today.

In the meantime, AI is on the verge of critically disrupting content ecommerce. The collapse of the mini/micro drama production industry in China over the last two months is a clear case in point: 

When AI can generate content at near-zero marginal cost, human-intensive content production pipelines get commoditised rapidly. For anyone investing heavily in physical and human infrastructure for content commerce, some caution is warranted.

We recently had an exchange session between a major client and an expert familiar with the thinking inside Pinduoduo/Temu and SHEIN. When asked which specific areas AI has truly changed – and where its impact is overestimated –  his framing was unusually clear-eyed:

That last point is worth sitting with. 

The real disruption may not be AI making existing ecommerce better. It may be AI changing how people find and decide – rendering current optimization playbooks gradually obsolete.