Sea Limited and Google Partner on AI Across Gaming, Commerce, Payments
Sea Limited and Google partner on AI across Garena, Shopee, and Monee. Agentic commerce tools position Southeast Asia as innovation hub, not follower market.
Sea Limited and Google formalized an AI partnership on February 19, 2026, covering all three of Sea's core business divisions: Garena (gaming), Shopee (e-commerce), and Monee (financial services).
Partnership Spans Gaming, Commerce, and Payments
The agreement, structured as a memorandum of understanding, outlines AI tool development across Sea's entire business portfolio.
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Shopee will work with Google to build an agentic shopping prototype, meaning software that can autonomously handle product discovery, user engagement, and transactions on behalf of shoppers. Garena will use Google's AI solutions to improve game development and player experiences, with access to early pilots of Google's latest AI research. Monee will collaborate with Google on the Agent Payments Protocol (AP2), an open-source framework for AI-powered payment transactions, providing direct feedback to shape the protocol for Southeast Asian market conditions.
"This partnership with Google on AI will drive innovation in the business application of the technology at scale, and allow us to make AI more accessible to the digitally underserved in our markets," said Forrest Li, chairman and CEO of Sea Limited.
Google Asia-Pacific President Sanjay Gupta said the two companies are "accelerating the adoption of this transformative technology and unlocking the immense economic potential of South-east Asia's digital landscape."
Competitive Pressure Drives AI Investment
Shopee held 52% of Southeast Asia's e-commerce market as of 2024, according to research firm Momentum Works, making it the region's dominant platform. That position faces active competition from Alibaba's Lazada and TikTok Shop, both deploying their own AI-enhanced commerce capabilities.
Alibaba announced a new AI system targeting the agentic commerce space in the same week as the Sea-Google deal, signaling that multiple major players are racing to establish AI-powered commerce infrastructure across the region simultaneously.
The E-Conomy SEA 2025 report, co-published by Google, Temasek, and Bain, identified agentic transactions as "largely untapped" in Southeast Asia. The report found that 60% of early agentic AI adopters reported more than threefold returns, positioning the region as an active development ground for this technology rather than a follower market.
Prior Collaboration Reduces Execution Risk
The February 2026 agreement builds on an established working relationship between Sea and Google. The two companies launched the YouTube Shopping Affiliate Programme with Shopee in 2024, now operational across all Southeast Asian markets, Taiwan, and Brazil.
Sea also partnered with OpenAI in 2025 to test autonomous shopping agents, later expanding that collaboration to payments and distribution. The Google partnership represents Sea's second major AI alliance with a leading technology provider, reflecting a deliberate strategy of maintaining multiple AI partnerships rather than depending on a single vendor.
Monee's co-development role in the AP2 framework gives Sea's financial services unit direct influence over the open-source payment standards that could govern agentic transactions across Southeast Asia's fragmented payment landscape.
No financial terms or specific implementation timelines were disclosed in the announcement.
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