Mind the Gap: How Britain Compares to Asia on AI Commerce Adoption

ONS puts UK retail AI adoption at 17%. India, Singapore and China sit at 50–59% on the equivalent IBM measure. The headline gap is real, and the story underneath it is more interesting than the headline.

Simon Seddon

Technology Specialist

—16 May 2026

A note on perspective before we start. Most of what follows leans on Thailand and Malaysia as the primary reference points, with China and India as supporting evidence. That's deliberate - I spent around five and a half years living across the region (first Johor Bahru, then Bangkok), working across both markets. The lived texture of this piece sits with the markets I can speak to honestly. The figures from China appear where they're unambiguous and publicly verified, and they're included for precisely that reason.

The first and clearest evidence I've ever seen of how different the conversational-commerce infrastructure is between Britain and Southeast Asia came from a simple, unassuming LINE chat.

A colleague in Malaysia had forwarded me a LINE (if you're unfamiliar, think Whatsapp with a full app ecosystem built-in...) chat link, connecting me to a local shop-keeper. All of my neighbours used it, apparently. Upon opening a chat with my new contact, I was hit with a welcome message, a photo of a menu, and swathes of emojis. It honestly felt noisy and chaotic, and my anti-trust instincts kicked in to overdrive. The idea, however, was simple: you'd post your order before lunch. The owner would emoji-react and screenshot a printed total. The expectation from me was then to send payment direct to their bank account, and send a screeshot of the payment. I know. Then a bag with a name on it would appear outside your flat door. There was no specialist app. There was no checkout. There was a chat, a reasonable mutual trust, and a refreshing, genuine sense of humanity, gratitude, and personalisation.

This may sound like a quaint localised anecdote, but I soon learnt that this model of commerce-in-conversation extended beyond my local nasi lemak stall. It was the default way to buy from small-medium retailers across the region, and it was a significant channel for larger retailers too. The infrastructure of commerce in Southeast Asia is built around chat.

Years later, when AI shopping assistants arrived in that environment, they didn't have to convince anyone that commerce-in-conversation was a legitimate idea. The idea was already embedded culturally, and within the apps where the customers lived. It just got smarter.

Britain and elsewhere are trying to bolt the same idea on to an infrastructure that was built around clicks and convoluted purchasing funnels. That's the gap this piece is about, and it's a more durable gap than the adoption-rate league tables suggest.

The adoption gap is real, with some asterisks

Let's start with the headline figure, because it's worth getting right. ONS Wave 141, the late-September 2025 release, puts UK retail AI adoption at 17%. That's against 23% across all UK businesses, and 36% for large companies. The retail-sector figure has been climbing slowly; the September read is up from earlier in the year. But it's still the lowest sectoral cut in the bulletin.

The cross-market comparison gets messier, and the methodology is worth being explicit about because the figures travelling around at the moment confuse two quite different measures. The cleanest cross-country benchmark I could find for active enterprise AI use is the IBM Global AI Adoption Index, which surveyed IT professionals at large organisations across fifteen markets. By that measure, organisations in India (59%), the UAE (58%), Singapore (53%) and China (50%) lead. The UK didn't make the top tier. On the related question of who is most likely to accelerate AI rollout, IBM puts China at 85%, India at 74%, the UAE at 72%, and the UK at 40%, among the lowest in their sample alongside Australia and Canada.

The ONS and IBM figures aren't strictly comparable. ONS asks broadly across the whole business population; IBM samples IT professionals at larger firms. The methodologies differ. But the direction of travel is the same one Microsoft and Stanford have been reporting independently, and the direction of travel for the UK is not flattering: behind the markets we'd expect to be ahead of, and behind some we wouldn't.

What's underneath the numbers

Adoption rates measure a state. They don't tell you what it's like to be the 5pm BTS commuter checking out three orders before her stop, or to be the John Lewis shopper who has been clicking "next" through a multi-page checkout since 2009 and is, on the whole, fine with it. The story is what makes the state plausible.

In Thailand, LINE has 54 million users, accounting for 77% of the country's mobile internet users. The average user spends 67 minutes a day on the platform, out of 216 minutes total on their phone. Sixty-seven minutes is more than many people in the UK spend on every messaging app on their phone combined. But LINE in Thailand isn't really comparable to WhatsApp here. It's somewhere between Facebook, WhatsApp, your debit card, and the QR-code menu at every restaurant. Digitally, it's practically everything, everywhere, all at once.

The business layer of this is the thing British retailers tend to underestimate. There are more than three million LINE Official Accounts: businesses, government services, banks, brands. 92% of Thai internet users open LINE at least weekly. Over 85% of Thai shoppers interact with a brand through its LINE OA before visiting that brand's website. The OA isn't just the marketing channel; it's the storefront. The website is where you go to look up a product spec if the OA conversation hasn't already convinced you.

The picture in China is the same idea at an order of magnitude greater. WeChat Mini Programs generated approximately ¥3 trillion in GMV in 2024, around $400 billion. For scale, the whole of Southeast Asia's platform e-commerce GMV came to $157.6 billion in 2025 (Momentum Works). One product, inside one Chinese super-app, runs at over two and a half times the combined platform commerce of the entirety of SEA. And the format of that ¥3 trillion is, again, conversational and embedded: you don't leave the chat to make the purchase; the mini-program runs inside WeChat, with payment via WeChat Pay one tap away.

Underneath all of this sits a class of real-time payment rail that the UK has, in different form, had since 2008, but doesn't use in the same way. PromptPay, Thailand's instant interbank transfer system, processes around 74 million transactions a day. Total registered users (across multiple bank accounts and phone numbers per person) sit above 90 million in a country of about 71 million people. Singapore's PayNow has equivalent reach for its population, as does Malaysia's DuitNow and India's UPI. The interesting thing isn't that these rails exist. It's that consumers use them by default: for splitting dinner, for paying the corner shop, for closing out a LINE OA order. They're not "a payment option"; they're the substrate.

Faster Payments in the UK is technically excellent and underused for consumer transactions. Most British shoppers, when ordering from a chat with a small retailer, would still reach for a card.

The British comparator is fragmented

The UK has a conversational-commerce infrastructure of sorts. WhatsApp Business is genuinely useful for small retailers, and adoption is climbing. Meta reports over 400 million monthly active users globally, of which a majority are SMEs. TikTok Shop is increasingly useful but as yet largely untapped. The closest thing the UK has to LINE OA's near-universal commerce coverage is fragmented across WhatsApp Business at small scale, Instagram DMs at a different scale, and email at older-school scale. None of them has the chat-as-storefront defaultness that LINE has in Thailand or WeChat has in China.

That's not a brand failure. It's a coordination problem with regulatory, infrastructural, and habitual layers. The UK never developed the super-app pattern, partly because the platform commercial environment didn't push that way, partly because the regulatory environment is structured around platform fragmentation rather than consolidation, and partly because consumer habit was already settled around browser-and-app patterns by the time messaging platforms became plausible commerce surfaces.

This means that when an AI shopping assistant arrives in a UK retail context, it has to do two jobs at once. It has to be smart enough to be useful, and it has to convince a customer who has been buying in a search-bar-then-product-page-then-basket rhythm for fifteen years that having a conversation with a retailer is a normal thing to do. In Thailand, only the first of those jobs needs doing.

The May 2026 punctuation

Two announcements from the same week of May 2026 illustrate the point.

On the 11th, Alibaba announced that its Qwen AI app would integrate with Taobao and Tmall, giving the agent direct access to their four-billion-item catalogue: text or voice search, comparison, virtual try-on, 30-day price tracking, and checkout via Alipay, all inside a chat thread. Two days later, Amazon announced the upcoming retirement of Rufus (at least in its current form) and launched Alexa for Shopping in the US, with a "Buy for Me" feature that completes purchases on third-party retail sites. Two of the largest commerce platforms in the world shipped broadly equivalent capabilities within forty-eight hours of each other. Different press receptions, different framings, but the underlying technology bet was the same.

The interesting bit is which user base each platform is launching into. Alibaba's Qwen is rolling into a Chinese consumer base that has been buying via in-chat super-app interfaces for the better part of a decade. Amazon's Alexa for Shopping is rolling into a US consumer base (initially) that has been buying via search-then-page-then-cart patterns for nearly thirty years. The same product faces a very different first ninety days depending on which side of the conversation-vs-browser divide the customer arrives from.

There's a related observation worth surfacing. A May 2026 ResearchAndMarkets report puts global consumer AI use at 62% for product comparison, 23% at checkout, and 19% post-purchase. The gap between discovery and execution sits in authorisation, infrastructure and consumer trust; engineering work, in other words, rather than a question of better positioning.

Where consumers use AI in the shopping journey (ResearchAndMarkets, May 2026)

62%

23%

19%

Comparison

Checkout

Post-purchase

The economies that close that gap fastest are the economies whose infrastructure was already pointed in that direction. Asia's chat-and-rails pattern reduces the friction in checkout because the rails were already trusted and the chat was already where commerce lived. The UK's gap will close more slowly, because closing it means rebuilding consumer habit alongside deploying the technology.

What this means for British retailers

A few things, none of them ground-breaking, all of them worth being honest about.

1. The platform layer is becoming the discovery layer here too. Google's Universal Commerce Protocol has a Buy button live in US Search via Wayfair. Amazon's Alexa for Shopping is the equivalent move from a closed ecosystem outward. The pattern arriving in Britain over the next eighteen months looks structurally similar to the SEA platform-native model, just with different platforms running it. If your direct-to-customer relationship depends on owning the storefront, the storefront is moving.

2. Discovery without checkout-readiness is a leaky funnel. The 62%-to-23% drop-off measured by ResearchAndMarkets is what you should be reading as your engineering backlog. If an AI-mediated shopper finds your product, can they complete the transaction without their AI failing them? The answer for most UK retailers, today, is "depends on which agent and which checkout flow", which is a polite way of saying probably not. Building this isn't a marketing project.

3. The conversational-commerce habit is going to arrive eventually, but it won't arrive on platforms anyone here owns. WhatsApp Business is the closest infrastructure we have. It will probably do most of the heavy lifting in the SMB segment for the next few years. Larger retailers will face a tougher choice: build for messaging-as-storefront with the platforms that exist, or wait for a UK-native pattern that may not come.

A note on what I'm not saying

I'm not saying British retail technology teams aren't sophisticated. Several of them are excellent. I'm not saying the SEA model transplants cleanly to the UK; different payment habits, different regulatory environment, different consumer expectations around data and privacy all complicate the transfer. And I'm not predicting the gap closes on any particular timetable.

What I am saying is that the gap is real, the gap is structural, and the gap is not principally about technology. It's about consumer habit and the infrastructure beneath consumer habit. AI commerce arrived into a different set of starting conditions in Bangkok, Kuala Lumpur and Shanghai than it did in Manchester or Reading. Pretending otherwise is comforting but doesn't help anyone build for the next eighteen months.

Worth paying attention to. Worth being honest about where we are. Worth being clear that "we'll get there" isn't a strategy until we know what infrastructure we're getting there on.

Data sources and further reading