Sea Group and OpenAI deepen alliance to scale AI across Southeast Asia and Brazil
A massive regional expansion brings Shopee directly into ChatGPT, arming SMEs with conversational business tools and launching a regional Codex hackathon series.
Singapore-based tech giant Sea Limited announced a major expansion of its strategic partnership with OpenAI. The collaboration builds upon foundational work initiated in 2025 to bring advanced generative AI features to consumers and enterprises across Southeast Asia and Brazil. Through this alignment, Sea Group plans to drive artificial intelligence adoption across its e-commerce, digital payments, and tech infrastructure pipelines, embedding OpenAI’s models into both front-end consumer products and backend internal development workflows.
The most immediate public-facing development of the partnership is the integration of Sea’s premier e-commerce platform, Shopee, natively into OpenAI's ChatGPT application across eight vital markets: Singapore, Malaysia, Indonesia, the Philippines, Thailand, Vietnam, Taiwan, and Brazil.
This makes Shopee the first e-commerce operator spanning Southeast Asia and Latin America to deploy an active, context-aware shopping integration inside ChatGPT. Consumers can now type conversational prompts—such as looking for niche travel gear, curated fashion inspiration, or complex holiday gift lists—and receive direct, dynamic product suggestions sourced directly from Shopee's real-time inventory.
Users can browse these intelligent recommendations before seamlessly redirecting to the Shopee ecosystem to finalize their purchases. According to statements from both organizations, the long-term roadmap focuses on leveraging OpenAI’s autonomous web agent frameworks—such as the recently piloted Operator model—to eventually execute end-to-end shopping tasks securely on behalf of users.
AI tools for local SMEs
Beyond consumer search, the partnership introduces critical enterprise-grade assistance to the broader merchant channel ecosystem. Eligible small and medium-sized enterprise (SME) sellers operating on Shopee are gaining structured trial access to ChatGPT for Business tools tailored specifically for digital storefront operations.
These tools are designed to streamline several resource-intensive tasks for regional merchants:
- Product optimisation: Generating automated, high-converting product descriptions and translation localization across regional languages.
- Marketing & content creation: Instantly drafting targeted promotional assets, social copy, and multi-channel campaign messaging.
- Customer service operations: Deploying responsive, automated customer care models capable of handling complex tier-one inquiries smoothly.
By providing small sellers with access to institutional generative AI capabilities, Sea and OpenAI are working to reduce overhead costs and equalize the operational playground between micro-merchants and massive multinational retail brands.
Behind the scenes, Sea Group is also aggressively integrating OpenAI’s foundational layers deep within its internal corporate software architecture. The tech conglomerate is rolling out ChatGPT Enterprise accounts to its internal technical divisions, driving immediate productivity enhancements across software development engineering, continuous code testing, localized content translation, and corporate operational pipelines.
Sea Limited Chairman and CEO Forrest Li emphasized that the partnership aims to make AI more meaningful for local communities by merging OpenAI’s technology with Sea’s ecosystem to boost competitiveness. As regional competition grows, this collaboration positions Sea Group at the forefront of AI-driven digital transformation in emerging markets.