The next billion shoppers don’t buy the way you think they do

The global commerce industry is building fast. Visa’s Trusted Agent Protocol is piloting across Asia Pacific. Google’s Universal Commerce Protocol, Mastercard’s Agent Pay and Shopify’s agentic storefronts are each racing to define AI-powered shopping. But the consumer they’re designed for is not where the growth is. 

By 2030, Gen Z across Southeast Asia and India — home to 60% of the world’s Gen Z population — will drive an estimated $5 trillion in annual spending. The question is whether the infrastructure being built today was designed for them at all. 

A different commercial architecture 

In these markets, the purchase journey unfolds inside chat threads and livestreams (i.e. nearly half of shoppers were already using chatbots in their purchase journey by 2024), shaped by community validation and social proof. 

In Vietnam, more than 90% of internet users are on Facebook, and many complete purchases within a messaging window. Conversational commerce gross merchandise value in Southeast Asia is expected to hit $23 billion in 2027, with 40% of Thai and 36% of Vietnamese consumers already buying this way. 

Trust works differently, too. In Indonesia, home to over 240 million Muslims, halal certification is the baseline for purchase trust across food, cosmetics, pharmaceuticals and logistics — not a product feature. In India, WhatsApp, with 500 million monthly active users and open rates exceeding 90%, is effectively the country’s commercial nervous system. Flipkart runs wholesale ordering through voice-enabled AI bots inside it. BigHaat Agro reaches 250,000 farmers monthly the same way. 

Then there’s the purchase logic. A meaningful share of buying across the region is done for someone else — a parent, a child, a friend — where the decisions are relational, not individual. An AI agent optimized for individual preference will routinely miss these transactions. 

Western agentic protocols are elegant solutions to a different problem. They read product catalogs fluently. They struggle to interpret the relationships, rituals and regulations that actually govern commerce here. 

The generation that changes everything 

Gen Z in these markets drives home the differences between the west and Southeast Asia and India. In Vietnam, Thailand and Indonesia, Gen Z uses AI primarily as a personalized shopping assistant to navigate the overwhelming choice of online marketplaces. In Thailand, platforms like Lazada use AI to curate product discovery for female Gen Z shoppers, while the majority use AI tools for detailed price comparisons and trend analysis before purchasing. 

Similarly, in Indonesia, AI significantly drives spontaneous purchasing on platforms like Shopee and Tokopedia; in Vietnam, Gen Z leverages AI not only for product discovery but also for interactive experiences like livestream shopping, where it enhances engagement and drives purchase intent for items ranging from cosmetics to food delivery. 

Gen Alpha — born between 2010 and 2025 — takes this further. Nearly half already use AI as a search engine. In Malaysia, 97% of Gen Alpha children have a financial account, with 46% holding digital wallets. Gaming is their primary social space: Roblox counts 88.9 million daily active users, and Asia Pacific (excluding China) is its largest regional market. For this generation, gaming, socializing and transacting have dissolved into a single experience before adulthood. 

These consumers will delegate purchasing decisions to AI agents. The infrastructure to serve them — verifying agent legitimacy, honoring cultural and regulatory constraints, earning community trust — has not yet been built. 

Where the defensible opportunity sits 

The protocol layer will commoditize, as search, social feeds and mobile apps did before it. The defensible layer sits one level below: cultural translation between local signal and commercial execution — mapping community sentiment to product attributes; calibrating AI so halal compliance outweighs price optimization in Indonesia, managing the handoff from AI discovery to human negotiation. 

Regional platforms — Shopee, Grab, Lazada, TikTok Shop — have built powerful engines inside closed ecosystems. The connective tissue between those environments and a market-native agentic layer doesn’t exist yet. The companies that build it, market by market, will be hard to displace. 

Innovators already building for this reality 

The NRF APAC Innovators Showcase surfaces exactly this. The most compelling companies this year are developing architectures native to the region’s commercial realities — not Asian versions of Western retail technology. 

Grivy 

Unifies first-party consumer data, POS signals and AI-driven activation across more than 135,000 store locations to connect digital engagement with verified in-store purchase — critical in markets where traditional trade still dominates. 

Moving Walls 

Builds software and measurement tools for digital out-of-home and in-store retail media, helping retailers and advertisers automate screen-based campaigns using audience and transaction data. 

LAAM 

Helps businesses digitize end-to-end, using its Octane technology to support omnichannel commerce, automated supply chain and warehousing, AI-driven storefront creation and growth tools for selling to consumers globally. 

Intelligence Node 

Real-time competitive intelligence across pricing, assortment and digital shelf visibility. In price-sensitive, high-velocity markets where consumers compare across platforms in real time, that precision is the foundation of margin strategy. 

The window is narrow 

The $5 trillion opportunity won’t wait for Western protocol builders to localize. The ones who capture it are already designing for today’s hybrid consumer — the shopper who discovers on TikTok, negotiates on WhatsApp, transacts on Shopee, and whose trust has to be earned through community, not just digital verification. 

The NRF APAC Innovators Showcase is where that generation of builders meets the retail industry at this year’s NRF Retail’s Big Show Asia Pacific. The protocols are being written now. The question is which ones will actually work here. 

Debra Langley is a Partner at CAPTIS Ventures, and a member of the NRF Innovation Advisory Committee and the NRF APAC Advisory Board.