AI making major splash in trade with ASEAN

Artificial intelligence is rapidly transitioning from a conceptual showcase to a practical driver of cross-border trade, reshaping the economic, industrial and digital integration between China and the Association of Southeast Asian Nations.

Wei Qiaomei, a livestreamer, once struggled to grasp exactly what her Thai customers wanted, despite speaking fluent Thai. Ahead of a recent pitch for a portable fan, an AI system analyzed Thai e-commerce data and instantly provided her with two localized selling points: quiet motors and long battery life. The trial proved highly rewarding, with her employer, based in South China's Guangxi Zhuang autonomous region, reporting a 300 percent jump in sales.

Noting that speaking a language is not the same as understanding a market, the 23-year-old observed that AI had transformed her from a mere translator into a market-savvy presenter. Her company trained its model on ASEAN languages, local preferences and cultural nuances, enabling it to analyze products, process reviews and draft localized scripts, while livestreaming hosts decide when to pivot, how to handle tough questions and what to emphasize. For Wei, the technology did not replace her. Rather, it amplified her capabilities.

Wei's story reflects a broader, systemic shift in relations between China and ASEAN, as both sides aim to expand the role of AI in bilateral trade, which exceeded $1 trillion (7.1 trillion yuan) last year. In the first seven months this year, China-ASEAN trade rose 24.7 percent year-on-year to $744.41 billion, according to Chinese Customs data, driven by the expanding use of advanced computing in marketing, agriculture, logistics and finance. The distinction between technology that merely draws a crowd and technology that delivers tangible commercial value was the central focus of the 23rd China-ASEAN Expo and the China-ASEAN Business and Investment Summit, held in Nanning, capital of Guangxi, in September.

The event brought together more than 3,400 companies across a total exhibition area of 170,000 square meters, with Timor-Leste attending for the first time as ASEAN's 11th member and an official co-host. The expo's inaugural "AI marketplace" and exclusive exhibition areas for ASEAN national market needs featured about 500 products from more than 70 companies across eight categories, including wearables, health management and consumer technology, allowing visitors to test and purchase items on-site.

Wang Jicai, secretary-general of the China-ASEAN Expo Secretariat, said: "While AI was mostly for show last year, it is now actively propelling sales and becoming a new hot spot for regional economic and trade cooperation."

This transition from exhibition to execution is evident across multiple sectors and borders. In Laos and Cambodia, a platform developed by a Guangxi enterprise and local partners utilizes satellite imagery, drones and ground sensors to track pests and guide tropical crop cultivation.

Built with Chinese technology, local field data and training support, the system has been tested on more than 1,333 hectares of crops, said project head Wen Biaotang.

In Guangxi's border city of Chongzuo, the local center for disease control and prevention has partnered with neighboring Vietnamese provinces to deploy a bilingual platform for early disease detection, slashing epidemiological reporting times from four hours to just 30 minutes. Meanwhile, in Nanning, a platform named RunDo remotely monitors almost 300 megawatts of solar capacity across nearly 3,000 sites in Malaysia, replacing manual inspections with drones and intelligent algorithms.

The platform has boosted maintenance efficiency by over 30 percent, raised power output by up to 5 percent, and cut labor costs by more than 20 percent. Leveraging Nanning's computing infrastructure, ASEAN companies can avoid building large intelligent computing centers and remotely access models and computing power for their business needs, an approach that has already launched more than 80 computing projects across the region.

The demand for practical, industry-level solutions was highly palpable at the expo, where entities like Guangxi Publishing and Media Group and Maiyue Technology showcased their innovative applications to empower China-ASEAN digital industry cooperation.

During the event, Li Laiyou, chairman of Guangxi Publishing and Media Group, introduced an AI short drama co-creation platform. Launched in July 2026 by its subsidiary Flytoto Culture & Technology Co based in Nanning, the platform utilizes top-tier video generation technology to complete the entire production process — from scriptwriting to video generation, editing and dubbing. Since August, the group has produced over 100 AI short dramas, with about 40 already airing on major streaming platforms.

Designed as an open ecosystem, the AI short drama co-creation platform has attracted over 1,000 institutions and individual creators, including users from Malaysia and other ASEAN member states. Li said a local Southeast Asian film and television institution has already reached a strategic partnership with the group to jointly develop short dramas. This digital push builds upon the group's established physical presence in the region, which includes copyright export branches in Vietnam, Laos, Thailand and Malaysia, facilitating the export of about 400 book titles annually.

Over the next three to five years, the group plans to focus heavily on cross-border cooperation in the micro-drama sector. By partnering with leading overseas broadcasting platforms, it aims to export AI-generated content based on Chinese and foreign literary classics, using short dramas as a dynamic new medium to promote cultural exchange across ASEAN and beyond.

Similarly, Maiyue Technology, the official designated technical service provider for the expo, demonstrated the tangible impact of AI hardware across a massive 100-square-meter upgraded exhibition space. The company unveiled three new types of augmented reality and AI glasses — specifically designed for consumer translation, travel companionship and AR viewing.

These devices significantly expand language coverage and recognition accuracy, breaking traditional language barriers for cross-border exhibitions, tourism and daily life. The real-time, high-precision translation capabilities even drew the attention of prominent livestreamers, echoing the growing reliance on AI tools in digital commerce.

Beyond consumer hardware, Maiyue showcased its intelligent platform foundation and AI computing power all-in-one machines, presenting full-track solutions for education, government affairs, cultural tourism and aviation.

Furthermore, Maiyue launched five new products covering computing security, AR real-scene applications, simultaneous conference interpretation and cross-border payments. By providing self-service AI translation glasses rentals at the venue and supporting high-level forums with zero-latency translation systems, the company directly addressed ASEAN's diverse digital transformation needs.

To further anchor its regional presence, the newly opened Maiyue technology park exhibition hall hosted numerous overseas delegations and research teams, serving as a vital offline hub for linking China's AI scientific and technological strengths with ASEAN's digital cooperation.

The physical connectivity of the region is already undergoing a historic transformation. The full navigation of the Pinglu Canal has drastically shortened the inland shipping distance from China's southwestern hinterland to ASEAN markets, opening up a bidirectional economic corridor. Just as the canal bridges physical distances, spatial intelligence technologies are shortening the industrial distance of digitalizing the physical world from merely being visible to being practically usable.

Yang Yanyan, secretary-general of the China-ASEAN Business and Investment Summit Secretariat, emphasized that the accelerated construction of the China-ASEAN Free Trade Area 3.0 version has comprehensively launched cooperation in nine major areas, including the digital economy, the green economy, and the interconnectivity of industrial and supply chains.

Over its 22-year history in Nanning, the summit has held more than 200 economic and trade activities, effectively serving as an amplifier for government-business dialogue, a multiplier for economic cooperation and an optimizer for the business environment.

However, these cross-border deployments highlight strict prerequisites: computing power, local data, skilled workers and capable local partners. Guangxi's China-ASEAN artificial intelligence application cooperation center has cataloged more than 1,000 potential scenarios, opened 279 to developers, and set up offices in Vietnam, Laos and Malaysia, backed more than 30 cross-border projects, and assembled an alliance of 55 companies.

To address the low-resource challenge faced by some Southeast Asian languages, a training base in Malaysia has logged more than 1,900 hours of multilingual data annotation, while a regional competition attracted more than 200 teams.

Liu Jianmin, a professor at the School of Big Data and Artificial Intelligence of Guangxi University of Finance and Economics, said ASEAN universities, companies and professionals must contribute to collecting, labeling and updating data if models are to work locally, warning that no matter how accurate a system is, if no one uses it, can afford it or can keep it running, it remains just an exhibit.

This challenge is particularly acute for ASEAN's smaller economies. Miguel Marques Goncalves Manetelu, Timor-Leste's minister of transport and communications, cautioned that without collective action, the cost of cybersecurity, data governance and reliable frameworks could deepen an intelligence divide.

Addressing these concerns, Wang Jingtao, deputy head of the Cyberspace Administration of China, said China has always been an active advocate and practitioner of global AI governance, having released public goods such as safety governance frameworks and ethical application guidelines.

He offered four suggestions: encouraging open source options to empower industrial innovation; advocating for inclusivity to actively bridge the digital divide; adhering to security and controllability to jointly create a favorable environment; and strengthening multilateral cooperation to build a fair and reasonable governance system.

Regional leaders echoed the need for collaborative frameworks. Low Yen Ling, Singapore's senior minister of state for the Ministry of Trade and Industry and the Ministry of Culture, Community and Youth, highlighted that governance requires strengthened communication and experience sharing among regulatory agencies.

Saying that Singapore and China have jointly established a digital policy dialogue mechanism, she expressed hope for enhanced cooperation next year to translate technological potential into economic development momentum.

Similarly, Tiranee Achalakul, director of Thailand's Government Big Data Institute, said that Thailand has launched a core project for a Thai large language model and established a governance practice center, seeking deeper cooperation with China and other ASEAN members in talent capacity building and data market design.

The evolution from matchmaking to rulemaking is actively reshaping regional trade. Before the expo opened, an intelligent system had already generated more than 8,000 buyer-seller matches and arranged nearly 2,000 face-to-face meetings, providing real-time tariff and compliance guidance during negotiations. Yet, technology alone cannot establish cross-border data protocols, guarantee electronic signatures or assign liability when an algorithm fails.

Meng Shuang, an associate professor of international economics at the Central University of Finance and Economics, said AI can turn industrial expertise into a service delivered over time, pushing regional trade into complex territories like data governance, service pricing, electronic authentication and intellectual property.

The China-ASEAN Free Trade Area 3.0 Upgrade Protocol, signed in October 2025, sets out a regional framework covering the digital and green economies, cross-border data flows, personal privacy, digital payments and technical standards. Standardized electronic authentication, interoperable payments and joint data frameworks are expected to first benefit sectors such as cross-border e-commerce, smart logistics and industrial inspection.

Ge Hongliang, a researcher at the School of Southeast Asian Studies at Guangxi Minzu University, said cooperation among free-trade zones and ports under the upgraded protocol could strongly support investment, data sharing and IP protection. To advance this, the expo hosted its first high-level dialogue on aligning Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership rules with the upgraded free-trade agreement. Ultimately — whether it is building a unified spatial intelligence infrastructure across nations or establishing complex data governance protocols — the goal remains deeply practical: ensuring that a livestreamer like Wei Qiaomei always knows exactly which product feature matters most to a customer hundreds of miles away.