Southeast Asia’s $2 trillion opportunity: The future of retail personalisation

Author: Aaron CroweHead of Revenue, APAC, Eagle Eye

Discussions with retail leaders in Bangkok and Taipei reveal how AI-driven loyalty programmes are reshaping the competitive landscape.

Years of Netflix recommendations and Amazon’s “customers who bought this” suggestions have trained shoppers to expect personal recognition from every business they interact with. What started as a digital platform feature has become the baseline expectation in all retail channels.

Customers carry this expectation into every interaction. Whether browsing online or shopping in-store, they expect businesses to understand them. The content served to them – videos, products, promotions – is increasingly personalised, and anything less feels impersonal.

I was recently in Bangkok and Taipei with Eagle Eye CEO Tim Mason, meeting retail leaders and joining panel discussions with representatives from Google Cloud, Airship, Fifty-five, and NTT DATA about the mechanics of AI-driven personalisation.

The conversations reinforced something we’ve known for years but are only now seeing retailers truly embrace: Personalisation impacts profitability directly. Discussions around loyalty focused on omnichannel personalisation; what it is from a customer perspective and why it is so important.

Many retailers are keen to crack what omnichannel and personalisation really mean and deliver it. Some find these terms nebulous, but we have long said that omnichannel and personalisation are two sides of the same coin.

Omnichannel is what the business does; the organisational goal. Personalisation is what the customer experiences; how they feel the business serves them as an individual. You have to be in it to win it. Good businesses will be those that personalise experiences for individual consumers. By doing so they stand to sell more and at a higher margin.

We’ve talked about personalisation for years, but only now are retailers seeing it drive real profit. Boston Consulting Group predicts that over the next five years, $2 trillion in revenue will shift to companies that master personalised experiences and communications.

Tim opened the Bangkok presentation with a framework that’s guided successful retailers for decades. Loyalty programmes work because they reward the behaviour you seek. Good retailers understand there’s enormous untapped potential in their existing customer base. When businesses describe themselves accurately and adapt to better serve customers, spending increases and frequency improves.

Modern loyalty requires a connected approach. Eagle Eye talks about “turning the DIAL” – four elements that must work together: Data flows need to be connected and real-time. Insight generation must happen continuously. Loyalty programmes need to recognise and reward customers instantly. Action and execution must connect seamlessly in all touchpoints.

The AI transformation

Predictive and generative AI are accelerating personalisation at scale in ways that weren’t possible even a few years ago. The world of business-to-consumer is becoming truly personalised on a 1:1 scale. At Eagle Eye, our Eagle AI product already processes 2.8 billion customer interactions every single minute. The number is constantly growing, which improves how retailers connect with their customers at a 1:1 level.

This transformation is making personalisation a key driver of profitability. Retailers are moving beyond basic segment-based promotions to truly individual experiences. Beyond promotions, personalisation is expanding to more attributes in the customer journey – personalised cooking programmes, health and well-being tracking, charitable preferences.

Strong data foundations are essential for powerful AI solutions. Data was another big topic of discussion during the visit.

During the sessions, one of the Google representatives addressed the longstanding challenge of data platforms. For years, businesses have discussed unified data platforms, but many struggle with the question of return on investment.

AI has changed the equation. Rather than treating data platform investment as a massive project that must be completed before delivering value, the panellist suggested a different approach: start small, pick a challenge with significant business impact, run a quick proof of concept, and demonstrate value rapidly. Build confidence, then expand.

The “small steps, fast pace” philosophy came up repeatedly. AI moves too quickly for three-year transformation road maps. Tim shared Eagle Eye’s decade-long journey with AI personalisation:

“We started personalising, using AI to personalise promotions in 2015, so 10 years ago,” he said. “So for 10 years we’ve been developing algorithms to get better and better at predicting what people want to buy and how much they will spend, how much you need to incentivise them by. And we have seven algorithms that work in concert to create a promotion program.”

In the last year, Eagle Eye added transformer neural network capabilities on top of its existing algorithms, he said. The impact was immediate.

“The take-up rate of suggested offers has gone up by 20%,” he said. “So it’s pretty amazing, really. That’s like a step change in performance. Using a large language model, basically able to look around corners in ways I don’t even begin to understand, but it clearly does have the ability to see corners.”

Real-world impact

The business case for AI-driven personalisation has already been proven by major retailers globally. Southeast Asia stands to benefit significantly from these demonstrated results.

Tim shared results from Woolworths Group in Australia, which re-platformed its loyalty business with Eagle Eye. Former Woolworths Group CEO Brad Banducci previously explained the transformation: “Our real-time loyalty platform is a re-platforming of our loyalty business. It’s Eagle Eye, a next-generation loyalty platform that can be instantaneous, it can reconcile full history and it’s not constrained in terms of the offers we can provide or how we can re-purpose it.”

Tim also drew on Tesco’s history with loyalty. When Clubcard launched in 1995, Tesco held a 23% market share. That jumped to 33% in a relatively short period.

“Going from 23% to 33% in a market like grocery is phenomenally hard,” he said. “I mean, it just doesn’t happen because it’s much more stable and set than that.”

More recently, Tesco CEO Ken Murphy stated: “We introduced a little bit of personalisation and a little bit of gamification through Clubcard Challenges to over 10 million customers, and that had a great effect. There was a really, really strong response to that.” Tesco achieved its highest market share since 2016 following this initiative.

Being relevant costs less than spraying generic promotions in your customer base.

Execution and partnership

Getting personalisation right requires more than just technology and good intentions. Several important execution factors emerged from the discussions.

Another panellist raised a point that often gets overlooked: channel strategy and timing. The most perfectly targeted promotion fails if it’s sent through the wrong channel or at the wrong time. The technology ensures targeted promotions reach customers through channels they actually use, at times when they’re likely to engage.

At Eagle Eye, we deliver real-time personalisation at scale through promotion execution, handling more than 13,000 API calls per second, managing billions of weekly offers, and personalisation algorithms running on Vertex AI.

The technology exists. The business case is proven. What separates success from failure now is execution and partnership with providers who understand both retail operations and technical infrastructure.

The discussions in Bangkok and Taipei reinforced that we’re at an inflection point. Over the next five years, $2 trillion in revenue will shift to companies that master personalised experiences. The question isn’t whether to invest in AI-driven personalisation. It’s how quickly you can get there.

Author: Aaron CroweHead of Revenue, APAC, Eagle Eye

Image source: Unsplash