Shopee Brands Summit 2026: What AI-Powered Shopping Means for Retailers

Shopee Brands Summit 2026 signals AI-powered shopping at scale

Shopee Brands Summit 2026 made one thing clear: AI-powered shopping is no longer a pilot. The event highlighted how Shopee is blending automated discovery, ad optimization, and creator-driven commerce to improve conversion for both shoppers and brands. For e-commerce teams, this is a signal that marketplaces are shifting from “search and scroll” to assisted buying experiences that rely heavily on product data quality and real-time optimization.

This matters beyond Southeast Asia. Shopee’s scale and experimentation often foreshadow the tools that appear on other marketplaces and retail media networks. If you sell across channels, the playbook Shopee shared is a preview of what you will likely need to operationalize this year.

The strategic shift is also about measurement. As AI takes over more of the ranking and recommendation logic, platform reporting increasingly focuses on outcomes like conversion rate, basket size, and assisted revenue. That puts pressure on brands to make their product data machine-readable and consistently structured, so algorithms can confidently match intent to the right products.

What Shopee highlighted: AI across discovery, ads, and conversion

Shopee emphasized a tighter loop between content, ads, and fulfillment. The theme was not just “use AI,” but “use AI to move faster and spend smarter.” Key signals for brands:

• AI-driven discovery. Shopee spotlighted features that personalize product discovery and surface relevant offers, which raises the bar on structured attributes, titles, and imagery.
• Performance-focused ad tools. Newer ad solutions such as GMV Max and Brand Max were positioned as levers for growth, especially for brands trying to scale efficiently across campaigns.
• Creator and livestream momentum. Shopee continued to push social commerce formats, which require fast product data updates and consistent catalog hygiene across multiple content surfaces.

For product data teams, the takeaway is simple: your catalog now fuels both search and ad performance. If attributes are missing or inconsistent, AI systems cannot properly match shoppers to products, and your campaigns will pay the price.

Why this matters for brands: speed, relevance, and data quality

Marketplaces are increasingly optimizing on relevance rather than raw impressions. That shifts the burden onto your product data operations. Three practical impacts stand out:

1. Speed matters more than ever. Shorter merchandising cycles and faster ad iterations mean slow catalog updates create lost revenue windows.
2. Relevance beats volume. AI-powered ranking prefers precise attributes and clear differentiation, not long generic titles.
3. Consistency drives automation. The more structured your data is, the more effectively AI can automate bidding, targeting, and personalization.

This is where tools like Lasso can make the difference. When you can import supplier data, normalize attributes, and enrich missing specs automatically, you create the foundation AI systems need to match shoppers to the right products. See how Lasso supports this in its features and use cases.

Agentic shopping is moving from concept to prototype

Shopee’s summit focus aligns with broader industry momentum. Sea Group and Google recently announced a partnership to develop AI-powered shopping agents for Shopee, a sign that marketplaces are moving toward proactive, assistant-led shopping flows. The implication is that shoppers will increasingly rely on AI to summarize, compare, and choose products — and that AI will only be as good as the product data it can read.

The shift is already visible in payments and checkout research. Recent industry reports show that a growing share of consumers are open to AI-assisted shopping experiences, especially when it saves time or finds the right product faster. For retailers, this means the next competitive advantage is catalog readiness — the ability to serve consistent, accurate product data to every automated system across ads, search, and agents.

In practice, that means your catalog has to function as a structured product API, not a marketing document. AI assistants work best when they can parse size, material, compatibility, warranty, price range, and availability without ambiguity. They also need stable identifiers that make cross-channel matching possible.

If you want deeper background on AI shopping assistants, see our AI shopping assistants catalog or the broader perspective in our blog index.

Practical steps for product data teams this quarter

To adapt to the shift Shopee highlighted, prioritize a small set of high-leverage moves:

• Audit your top 100 SKUs. Ensure they have complete attributes, accurate imagery, and standardized titles.
• Lock your taxonomy. Map categories and variants consistently so AI can understand distinctions.
• Automate enrichment. Use structured attribute enrichment to fill gaps in size, material, compatibility, and use case.
• Unify content across channels. Keep titles, bullets, and specs aligned across marketplaces, ads, and on-site search.
• Measure feed health weekly. Track error rates, missing attributes, and ad disapprovals to avoid performance drift.

If you want a fast internal benchmark, define a “minimum viable data set” per category and score each SKU against it. Teams often start with 10-15 attributes that directly influence discovery and conversion, then expand based on performance data. Even small improvements in attribute completeness can unlock better targeting and relevance for AI systems.

Teams that operationalize these steps are the ones that benefit most when platforms introduce new AI-driven formats.

Getting started with AI-ready catalogs

Shopee Brands Summit 2026 is a reminder that e-commerce success is now a data discipline as much as a marketing one. If your product data is messy, AI tools will amplify that mess. If it is clean and structured, AI can accelerate growth.

Lasso helps teams build AI-ready catalogs by cleaning and enriching product data, generating optimized listings, and keeping content consistent across channels. Explore pricing or contact us if you want to see how it fits your workflow.