Is 2026 Asia’s AI moment?

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In focus

• Selected newsroom predictions for 2026
• Charts capturing Southeast Asia’s tough year for tech
• ID proptech startup MilikiRumah seeks to raise US$10m

Hello reader,

Predictions are hard. Just ask Mustafa Suleyman, CEO of Microsoft AI, who in 2023 said hallucinations by LLMs would largely be eliminated by 2025. That hasn’t quite panned out.

But that hasn’t stopped our journalists and editors from making their predictions for 2026.

One thing is clear across what our newsroom sees for next year: AI will continue to dominate the tech conversation in Asia. If 2025 was the year it became obvious that AI would touch nearly every part of our lives, bubble or not, 2026 will be pivotal for a different reason.

Image credit: thesohailmart / 123RF

As major players such as OpenAI and Anthropic deepen their push into Asia, the key question is whether AI turns the region into a source of value to be extracted or a place where value is created and retained. The answer will hinge less on model-building and more on who controls data, distribution, and pricing power.

That tension between value creation and extraction runs through Tech in Asia’s predictions for 2026.

Old-school shopping here to stay

For most people, shopping is therapy, and they don’t get an adrenaline rush from an item that another person – or bot – bought on their behalf. AI agents still can’t purchase items without human supervision, but more importantly, there’s no indication that that’s what shoppers actually want. ~ Melissa Goh, senior editor

Say goodbye to web crawlers and hello to APIs!

In 2025, we discovered that almost everything on the public internet was being scraped and used to train AI models. So in 2026, expect many companies to try to reassert control over their data.

Anything with even a whiff of proprietary data may soon require a login or a subscription to access. Social media posts, financial data, and news stories could soon be inaccessible to web crawlers, which will kill web searches as we know it.

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