The projection is that Southeast Asia’s digital economy will reach between $300–340 billion in Gross Merchandise Value (GMV) by 2025. The retail landscape of Southeast Asia, specifically Singapore and Malaysia, is undergoing rapid transformation. The dynamic nature of the retail industry in Southeast Asia necessitates adopting innovations that have gone beyond optional to mandatory status. Retailers across Singapore and Malaysia are now leading in the adoption of digital platforms. They are improving customer interactions while integrating and automating their connected supply chains and business processes. In this blog, we explore how Vertex AI is helping retailers in Southeast Asia stay agile, innovative, and customer-focused.
Build seamless retail experiences with AI
Modern retailers deploy advanced technological solutions because they need to meet augmented client demands while using top competitors and providing smooth omnichannel interactions. Google Cloud’s Vertex AI provides a unified Machine Learning(ML) platform that brings a revolutionary change to the way retailers function in dynamic markets.
The Retail Landscape in Singapore & Malaysia
Singapore and Malaysia have quickly become leaders in the retail innovation space. Singapore has well-developed infrastructure and digital maturity, making it an easy choice for regional retail headquarters, while Malaysia has an ever-growing e-commerce adoption rate and a rapidly growing mixed-class market. However, businesses in both countries experience challenges, such as under- or overstocking inventory, inefficient supply chains, and the demand for hyper-personalized customer experiences.
Retailers across the two countries are more frequently tapping into each other’s consumer markets to drive growth. Brands from Singapore are increasingly entering Malaysia and Thailand in search of larger markets. Retailers in Malaysia are also focusing on addressing fragmented logistics and maintaining customer loyalty.
In addition to this, the acceleration of digital commerce has amplified the need for data-informed decision-making. In addition to investing in AI platforms and analytics to simplify operations, retailers are better understanding consumer behaviour, predicting trends, and establishing predictive models to drive strategic growth and decision-making for both local and cross-border sales.
What is Google Cloud Vertex AI?
Google Cloud’s Vertex AI is an end-to-end machine learning platform for building, deploying, and managing ML models. It simplifies the AI workflow into a single platform that enables data scientists and developers to train models through both custom code and AutoML, store datasets, and check model performance. It manages structured and unstructured data, queried to BigQuery and Looker, and has strong MLOps. It helps companies build AI-driven applications quickly and easily, simplifies infrastructure, and fosters collaboration across teams.
Key features include:
- AutoML and custom training support: Users can build models with very little coding using AutoML or custom code and custom training.
- Vertex AI Workbench for collaborative development: It integrates an environment for teams to experiment, build, and share ML models collaboratively.
- Pipelines for scalable ML workflows: Enables Orchestration of repeatable, end-to-end ML workflows to continuously train and deploy models.
- Feature Store and Model Monitoring for continuous refinement: Enables centralized and reusable features while continuously monitoring the deployed model to ensure that it remains “live” and performs well over time.
- Extendable to GenAI models: VertexAI can work along with GenAI models like PaLM and Gemini for additional use cases. This allows the solution users to leverage powerful generative models to automate tasks, such as creating content for marketing, semantic search, and conversational AI.
- Explainability tools and fairness metrics: Built in for transparency and trust in all AI outputs, these features allow retailers to better understand their model’s decisions, while also confirming that they have ethical AI through built-in interpretability tools and bias identification.
Image 1: Key Features of Vertex AI
Google Vertex AI for Retailers in Singapore & Malaysia
- Hyper-Personalized Customer Experiences: Vertex AI provides retailers with the tools to create recommendation systems, personalized search results, and accurate forecasts of customer behaviour. This is a major benefit in markets such as Singapore and Malaysia, where customers demand tailored experiences.
- Operational Efficiency Through Predictive Analytics: Retailers can also utilize predictive models to forecast demand, minimize inventory, and manage supply chains. This is especially beneficial for Malaysia, which suffers from supply chain fragmentation as a fundamental challenge.
- AI Solutions that Scale for SMEs and Larger Retailers: Large enterprises and small regional retailers can use Vertex AI solutions, which are built to scale. With AutoML, teams with limited ML expertise can still harness its capabilities, leveling the playing field and enabling broader access to AI-driven innovation.
- Unified omnichannel customer experiences: As consumers operate in both online and offline channels, Vertex AI helps to unify their customer data and create integrated experiences.
The Gen AI Advantage: Retail Search & Beyond
There are added benefits to Vertex AI’s special relationship with Google’s generative AI models. Google Cloud Retail Search enables retailers to create search experiences that leverage natural language understanding. The result is an increase in conversion rate by helping shoppers find relevant products faster. This is particularly relevant to very large catalogs where keyword-based searching often fails.
Gen-AI can be used for:
- Automated product tagging and categorization: Utilizes image recognition and NLP to classify and classify products quickly, improve inventory, and searchability.
- Conversational agents for customer support: Enables AI-powered bots and assistants that can understand and respond to customer inquiries in multiple languages, with reduced response times and volume of service.
- Content generation for marketing and promotions: Automatically generates high-quality, on-brand product descriptions, social media text, and promotional copy, which can substantially alleviate the workload of marketing teams as well as improve turnaround times for campaigns.
Case Studies
GenAI Chatbot for Query Resolution for Entrepreneurs in SEA: Founded in 1935 and headquartered in Singapore, Southeast Asia’s third-largest bank sought to modernize lead identification and improve advisor competency through digital innovation. Aiming to enhance customer experience and support regional growth, the client turned to Google Cloud Platform’s Generative AI. We built a GenAI-powered chatbot using Vertex AI to assist entrepreneurs in setting up businesses in Singapore and Malaysia. It delivers accurate responses to investment queries by retrieving data from client documents, public websites, and the internet. The chatbot also streamlines support and generates FDIA leads by analyzing website queries.
Building an AI-Driven SearchBot: A leading postal and logistics company, with roots dating back to 1819, sought to streamline customer service and reduce reliance on phone and email queries. Operating globally across 13 offices and 56 Post Offices, the client needed a more efficient way to handle customer inquiries. We developed a GenAI-powered SearchBot with a user-friendly interface for customer executives. It leverages NLP to understand and respond to a wide range of customer questions—such as service and pricing details—by efficiently searching the client’s extensive knowledge base, significantly improving query resolution and customer experience.
Conclusion
In a fast-paced and digitally driven retail environment, it takes more than just the adoption of new technologies into the business to stay competitive. It requires a plan and the right partner to execute it. Google Cloud’s Vertex AI provides retailers with the machine learning and generative AI functionalities necessary to deliver a personalized experience to customers, optimize a supply chain, and seamlessly scale operationally across both digital and physical channels.
At Niveus Solutions, we bring deep domain expertise in cloud and AI to help retailers across Singapore, Malaysia, and the broader Southeast Asia region unlock this transformative potential. As a trusted Google Cloud Premier Partner, we specialize in designing, deploying, and scaling AI-powered solutions that are tailored to your specific business needs. Whether you’re starting or looking to elevate your existing AI strategy, Niveus is your ideal partner in driving innovation, agility, and sustained growth in the competitive retail landscape.
