Deloitte reckons Asia Pacific will drive around two thirds of the growth in global retail sales over the next five years, backed by a shopper base of more than four billion people.
APAC will drive two thirds of global retail sales growth, with nearly 75% of consumers already using AI to shop — but only 29% of businesses have adopted agentic AI. Singapore is becoming the live testbed for authenticated agentic transactions and regulatory guardrails.
Deloitte reckons Asia Pacific will drive around two thirds of the growth in global retail sales over the next five years, backed by a shopper base of more than four billion people.
Nearly 75% of APAC consumers already use AI to discover, compare and research products when shopping. What's still catching up is the business side. Only 29 percent of consumer businesses in the region say they've adopted agentic AI in their own operations today, marketing, customer support, sales, but Deloitte expects that to jump to 76 percent within two years.
Singapore is where that forecast is showing up in practice. DBS and UOB, two of Singapore's largest banks, ran the region's first authenticated agentic transaction, an AI agent booking and paying for an airport transfer, verified through Mastercard's Agent Pay rails. DBS separately piloted the same idea with Visa on food and beverage purchases. It's not just consumer spending either, HSBC, SourceSage and a Singapore merchant called FortyTwo completed a B2B agentic purchase on the same rails in May.
What's less talked about is the regulatory groundwork happening alongside it.
Singapore's central bank and financial regulator, the Monetary Authority of Singapore (MAS) just published an industry white paper on safeguards for AI agents handling financial tasks.
Singapore's tech regulator, the Infocomm Media Development Authority (IMDA) separately released a governance framework specifically for agentic AI this year.
Live transactions plus regulators actively working through the rules alongside industry is a meaningful part of why Deloitte is confident this region can lead rather than follow.
Here's the challenge for brands. There are two separate things you need to get right.
Can AI models recommend you, e.g. do you have clean, structured product data machines can easily verify?
Can you complete the purchase, e.g. do your systems recognise a legitimate AI agent instead of blocking it as bot traffic, do you support the payment protocols agents use?
Getting recommended doesn't matter if the sale fails at checkout.
That's exactly what MARK was built for: helping brands get the infrastructure right on both sides, the product data that gets you recommended and the systems that let a purchase actually go through.
- —APAC will drive around two thirds of global retail sales growth, with nearly 75% of consumers already using AI for shopping — but only 29% of businesses have adopted agentic AI.
- —Singapore is the live testbed: DBS and UOB ran the region's first authenticated agentic transactions, while MAS and IMDA build regulatory guardrails.
- —Brands need both recommendation and checkout infrastructure: machine-readable product data to get chosen, and agent-aware payment systems to complete the sale.