Shopee just got added to ChatGPT, and it’s a Southeast Asia first

Sea Limited and OpenAI have signed a new strategic partnership, and the part shoppers will notice is that the Shopee app now lives inside ChatGPT. 

The deal builds on a relationship the two companies have been growing since 2025, and it pushes AI deeper into how millions of people across Southeast Asia and Brazil shop, sell and build.

The Shopee App is available in ChatGPT for users in Indonesia, Malaysia, the Philippines, Singapore, Thailand, Taiwan, Vietnam and Brazil. That makes Shopee the first e-commerce platform of its kind to show up in ChatGPT across both Southeast Asia and Latin America.

A buyer’s query and the results in ChatGPT

Photo: Shopee

If you have used ChatGPT apps before, the pattern will feel familiar. As OpenAI explained when it introduced apps in ChatGPT, you can call an app by name or let ChatGPT suggest one when it fits what you are talking about, and the first time you connect, it tells you what data gets shared. The whole thing runs on the Apps SDK, which OpenAI built on the Model Context Protocol, the open standard that lets ChatGPT talk to outside tools.

If you’re a buyer, when inside ChatGPT, you can describe what you are after in plain language. So, gift ideas, fashion inspiration, travel essentials, or a hunt for one very specific item, and Shopee surfaces recommendations you can look at right there in the conversation, before carrying on to checkout on Shopee itself. 

Beyond the consumer friendliness, the partnership reaches further than just product discovery. Having started working together last year, Sea and OpenAI are keeping that going by also adding tools aimed squarely at sellers. ChatGPT for Business, which Sea is bringing to Shopee’s seller ecosystem, uses AI to write product listings and marketing copy, streamline customer service workflows, and automate the fiddly day-to-day operations that eat up a small seller’s time. Eligible sellers get ChatGPT for Business trials backed by onboarding resources, training and best-practice guides, the sort of hand-holding that decides whether small merchants actually adopt this stuff or quietly ignore it.

Forrest Li, Sea’s Chairman and Chief Executive Officer, framed it around the company helping consumers and small businesses, saying: 

The partnership reflects a shared commitment to making AI more accessible and meaningful for the communities Sea serves, with the aim of giving businesses of all sizes a way to use AI to grow and stay competitive. 

Denise Dresser, OpenAI’s Chief Revenue Officer, put it in terms of meeting people where they already are. By bringing OpenAI’s technology into products people use daily, she said, the goal is to make AI more useful in everyday life, help small businesses grow, and let more people put AI to work as an operating layer across their work.

Developers also get a look in as the partnership supports Sea’s own AI adoption and opens up Codex, OpenAI’s coding tool, to the wider builder community in the region.

Sea and OpenAI had already run the first regional Codex Hackathon series in the Asia Pacific. It kicked off in Singapore on 6 June 2026, pulled in more than 1,200 applications, and ended in a showcase of 40 shortlisted teams. More hackathons are lined up for Vietnam, Taiwan, Indonesia and Malaysia in the coming months.

Sea has been leaning into AI across the board. In February 2026, it signed a Memorandum of Understanding with Google to co-develop AI across Shopee, Garena and Monee, including an agentic shopping prototype and work on Google’s payments protocol. 

On its most recent earnings call, Sea said AI chatbots were already handling about 80 percent of customer queries and had cut customer service costs by roughly 30 percent year on year, and that it was testing AI shopping assistants and virtual business advisers. So Shopee in ChatGPT is less a one-off and more the visible tip of a company-wide push.

In a market where Lazada, backed by Alibaba, is pushing its own agentic AI models, the race to be the place where AI agents do your shopping is on, and Sea clearly wants a foot in every camp.