I run an agency from Koh Phangan, a Thai island better known for beach parties than for B2B marketing, and for the past year and a half the oddest line in our clients’ analytics has been a referral source called chatgpt.com. It barely existed in 2024. Now it turns up week after week, small but climbing, and the visitors who arrive through it behave differently. They land on a pricing page rather than the homepage. Something has already done the comparing for them.
That one analytics row is why I think founders in this region should be watching AI assistants more closely than founders almost anywhere else. The region is not behind on this shift. If anything, it is set up to move through it faster than the West.
Here’s why the next B2B sales advantage is a shorter distance from signal to conversation
A region with a habit of skipping steps
Large parts of Southeast Asia never had a desktop era. The first computer most people owned was a phone. Credit cards never reached mass adoption in Indonesia, Vietnam or the Philippines, so payments jumped straight to e-wallets and QR codes, and today a noodle stall in Bangkok takes QR payments while plenty of shops in Germany still want cash. Each time the region skipped a step, the companies that noticed early ended up owning the category, and the ones that waited for the old pattern to play out spent years catching up.
Discovery looks like the next skip. The ritual of opening Google, scanning ten blue links and comparing three tabs was never as deeply set here as it is in the US or Europe. If your first internet was a chat app on a cheap Android phone, typing a question to an assistant in plain language is not a new behaviour. It is the behaviour you already had, with a better answer at the end.
The numbers point the same way
The tenth edition of the e-Conomy SEA report from Google, Temasek and Bain, published in November 2025, puts the digital economy of this region of 680 million people past US$300 billion in gross merchandise value. It also carries a telling subtitle, From Digital Decade to AI Reality, and most of its pages read as an argument that AI is the next growth engine. Google’s survey work around the report found consumer interest in AI across Southeast Asia running roughly three times the global average.
The usage data agrees. ChatGPT’s mobile app passed one billion monthly active users in May 2026, according to Sensor Tower, and the Philippines ranked sixth in the world for adoption. That is a country of about 115 million people outranking most of Europe in its uptake of a tool that answers questions, compares products and recommends suppliers.
Money follows the behaviour. Adobe has tracked visitors arriving at US retail sites from AI tools since October 2024, and by May 2026 that traffic had grown more than fourteenfold, with those visitors converting 54 per cent better than people arriving from other channels. The data is American, but behaviour like that travels, and the region most enthusiastic about AI is unlikely to lag on it for long.
To be clear about scale: for every business I can see into, assistant referrals are still small next to Google. I am not claiming otherwise. What matters is the direction, because what these systems believe about a company takes months of accumulated text to change, and that work cannot be bought in a hurry once a category gets crowded.
How an assistant decides who to name
When someone asks an assistant for the best payroll tool for a 40-person company in Manila, the model does two things. It draws on what it absorbed during training, and increasingly it also searches the live web and reads a handful of pages before answering. In both cases it leans on written sources it treats as credible: established media, industry publications, review platforms, clearly structured company pages. It cannot call your sales team or sit through a demo. As far as the machine is concerned, your company is whatever the written record says it is, in the places these systems actually read.
For marketers, this is an awkward adjustment. Rankings can be tracked daily. What an assistant says about you is fuzzier, varies between models, and often cites sources you had forgotten existed. But it now shapes how buyers form a shortlist, and the shortlist is most of the battle, because the buyer never sees the options that were left out.
The scarcity advantage
Here is the part specific to this region, and the reason I wrote this for a Southeast Asian publication rather than a global one. The text these models learned from skews heavily English and heavily Western. Coverage of Southeast Asian companies is thin by comparison. Ask an assistant a category question about the American market and it reconciles hundreds of credible sources. Ask the same question about Vietnam or Malaysia and it may be working from a dozen.
That thinness cuts both ways. It hurts because assistants often default to global brands even where a stronger local option exists. The local option is not being rejected. It is simply absent from the record. It helps because the bar to become the answer is low. In a crowded Western category, changing what AI says about a market can take years of coverage. In a Southeast Asian niche, I have watched a few substantive articles in publications the models actually retrieve from change the answer to a category question within months. Scarcity does the work for whoever shows up first. (The effect is stronger again in Thai, Vietnamese or Bahasa Indonesia, where the source pool shrinks further, but local language visibility deserves its own article.)
Five moves that cost more time than money
First, find out what the machines currently say about you. Ask ChatGPT, Gemini and Copilot the questions your customers actually ask, such as the best option in your category in Jakarta, alternatives to a named competitor, or whether your brand is legitimate. Do it in English and in your market’s main language, and note who gets named and which sources are cited. It costs an afternoon and it is usually uncomfortable reading.
Second, chase citations rather than coverage counts. PR in this region still gets measured in clippings. For AI visibility, one substantive article in an outlet the assistants retrieve from is worth more than ten syndicated press releases. The audit from the first step tells you which outlets those are, so aim there.
Third, publish a number nobody else has. Models reach for citable data. A startup that surveys even 300 of its own users about payment habits or delivery costs in its niche can become the reference source for that topic, because in a thin market there is often no competing dataset at all.
Fourth, make your own site legible. Say plainly what you do, for whom, in which markets and at what price, and keep your company name consistent everywhere it appears. This is boring work. It also matters more than it used to, because a retrieval system that cannot parse your homepage will quietly leave you out of answers you should have been in.
Fifth, start measuring now. Create an analytics segment for referrals from assistant domains and review it monthly next to branded search. The numbers will look trivial for a while. So did e-wallet transactions in 2016.
The window is the point
None of this is a reason to abandon SEO. Google still sends far more traffic than every assistant combined, and Google is folding AI-generated answers into its own results anyway, so the same written record now feeds both. My argument is about timing. In most Southeast Asian niches, the answer to “who should I use?” has not hardened yet.
The region has been early to every discovery shift so far, from mobile-first internet to social commerce. Founders here can be early to this one too, and the ones who start now will be the names the machines suggest while everyone else is still arguing about whether any of this matters.
The article titled “Southeast Asia leapfrogged desktops and credit cards. Search could be next.” was authored by Boris Dzhingarov, the founder and CEO of ESBO Ltd
About the author
Boris Dzhingarov is the founder and CEO of ESBO Ltd (https://esbo.ltd), a digital PR agency that helps brands become visible to both search engines and AI assistants. He is a member of the Forbes Agency Council, the Entrepreneur Leadership Network and the Fast Company Executive Board, and he lives and works on Koh Phangan, Thailand.
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/boris-dzhingarov-94157a54/