Google launches new AI marketing tools to supercharge business growth in SEA
The announcement reaffirms Google's commitment to equipping marketers in Southeast Asia with tools that meet today's consumer behaviours: visual, voice-driven, and increasingly complex.
Southeast Asians turn to Google and YouTube not just to find information, but to explore, discover, and decide. With over 5 trillion searches annually and more than 1 billion daily shopping journeys, Google Search is rapidly evolving into an intelligent, multimodal assistant—powered by AI tools like Google Lens, Circle to Search, AI Overviews, and the new AI Mode.
YouTube, the region's #1 video platform, continues to be a powerhouse for brand discovery and business impact. It reaches more daily users across all generations than any other video platform and, importantly, delivers over 2X ROI compared to linear TV in key markets like Indonesia, Thailand, and Vietnam. YouTube also outperforms platforms like Meta and TikTok in ROI, thanks to its trusted creators and broad audience reach.
A New Generation of AI Tools for Marketers
Google's latest innovations span the entire marketing funnel—from creative production to predictive performance—bringing smarter, more personalised tools to marketers across Southeast Asia.
Sapna Chadha, Vice President of Google Southeast Asia and South Asia Frontier, said, 'As consumer journeys grow more complex and marketers face growing demands, our new AI tools offer speed, precision, and scale. These innovations allow businesses—big or small—to predict trends, reach the right audiences, and unlock performance with less manual effort.'
Highlights from Google Marketing Live SEA:
Ads in AI Overviews
AI Overviews is now the world's most used generative AI product, with 1.5 billion users worldwide. It helps answer complex queries through concise summaries and follow-up suggestions. Now, Google is introducing Ads in AI Overviews, offering brands the ability to appear in these smart summaries—right at the moment of curiosity and consideration.
Later this year, Ads in AI Overviews will launch in English in Malaysia, along with Singapore, Indonesia, and the Philippines. This will give local businesses new high-impact ad placements integrated into users' search experiences.
Asset Studio
This new feature in Google Ads uses generative AI to help marketers instantly create and customize visuals and videos using Google's advanced models like Imagen and Veo. It enables infinite creative variation, letting brands adapt content for different audiences and platforms with ease—speeding up campaign production and testing.
AI Max for Search
AI Max is a breakthrough tool that replaces manual keyword targeting with smart, intent-based matching. By analyzing your website and ads using Google's Gemini models, AI Max automatically generates high-performing headlines and matches ads to long-tail, voice, or image-based searches.
Malaysian telco Maxis piloted AI Max for Search to great success—reaching new customers through multilingual searches, including Chinese, and delivering ads that aligned precisely with user intent.
'We love how AI Max for Search expanded our Search reach with long-tail and multi-language terms, matching or beating our manual keyword click-through rate – all with just a checkbox,' said Aileen Soo, Head of Discovery at Maxis.
Regional brands are also seeing success—e-commerce giant Shopee reported 2X conversions and 49% higher ROI during a five-week trial across Southeast Asia.
AI Mode
Google's most advanced search experience yet, AI Mode, supports deeper reasoning, multimodal input, and follow-up interaction. Users are asking longer, more complex questions, and Google will soon test integrating ads within AI Mode responses in the U.S.—offering marketers even more high-quality touchpoints.
YouTube Creator Partnerships Hub
Brands can now use this new AI-powered tool to easily discover and collaborate with YouTube creators based on keyword, topic, or trend. The Hub includes audience analytics and lets marketers turn creator content into measurable ads. Already live in Singapore and Indonesia, the Hub will soon expand to more Southeast Asian markets.
Agentic AI in Google Ads & Analytics
Google is also adding agentic capabilities—smart assistants that work with marketers, not just for them. In Google Ads, Agentic AI can suggest real-time optimizations, generate creatives, and manage campaigns based on performance data. In Google Analytics, it provides smarter, instant insights—saving teams time and surfacing opportunities faster.
Powering Malaysia's Digital Growth
The rollout of Ads in AI Overviews in Malaysia later this year will be a key milestone, opening new pathways for local businesses to connect with potential customers at the most valuable moment: the start of the decision journey. Combined with other innovations like AI Max for Search, Asset Studio, and the YouTube Creator Partnerships Hub, these tools position Malaysian marketers to grow in a smarter, more agile way.
As AI transforms how people search, shop, and discover, Google is leading the charge—turning cutting-edge models into accessible, impactful tools for business success across Southeast Asia.
Interested in having your press releases, exclusive interviews, or branded content articles on Malaysiakini? For more information, contact [email protected] or [email protected]
Hashtags
Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles
The Star
5 hours ago
- The Star
No ‘disliking' on Instagram
EVER wonder why Instagram has no 'dislike' button? You're not alone. Maybe you've asked yourself why it's all hearts, thumbs-up and smiley faces – but never a simple 'your-post-is-no-fun-at-all.' It's not a glitch. It's a design. Welcome to the dark side of digital addiction. In an age where smartphones practically live in our hands, digital addiction is far from hyperbole. It covers everything from endless scrolling on Instagram and compulsively watching YouTube Shorts to binge gaming and obsessively checking notifications. Addictive behaviour isn't new – we've battled gambling, smoking and even coffee dependence – but our flickering digital world makes it worse. Why? Because digital space is always on, always connected and hard to escape. It hijacks our psychology; our brains crave quick dopamine hits, triggered by every buzz, swipe and glowing heart. This constant stimulation is especially harmful for teenagers. Teens are wired to seek novelty and approval, and Big Tech knows exactly how to exploit that. Picture this: You're a 15-year-old faced with algebra homework – tedious, stressful and hardly satisfying. Meanwhile, your phone offers instant relief. Just one more video. Just one more like. That tiny dopamine hit feels irresistible. And here lies the sinister brilliance of digital addiction: It offers a fast escape from discomfort while dulling the brain's ability to regulate impulses. The result? A vicious cycle of compulsive escape. This isn't just a personal failing – it's a structural problem, engineered into the very platforms we use. Which brings us back to the original question: Why no dislike button on Instagram? Facebook (now Meta), Instagram's parent company, uses behavioural psychology to maximise engagement. Negative feedback causes discomfort. Discomfort drives people away. And that's bad for business. So, no public 'dislike' button. Instagram has reportedly tested a private 'downvote' for comments – but let's be honest, that does little to address the deeper problem of addiction by design. Research by Kaitlin Woolley and Marissa Sharif in Harvard Business Review explains why these designs are so effective. Watching several short videos in a row increases the urge to keep watching. Labelling content as 'similar' drives up engagement. And uninterrupted viewing? Even more addictive. These patterns increase what psychologists call 'cognitive accessibility' – our brains find the content easier to process, making it feel more rewarding. Platforms exploit this by feeding us seamless flows of content designed to keep us watching. It's clear that these features aren't about authentic feedback or real connection. They're 'dark patterns' that trap users – especially teens – in loops of envy, anxiety, validation-seeking and disengagement from reality. But here's the good news: Digital addiction is something we can overcome – if we take it seriously. A study led by Noah Castelo at the University of Alberta found that blocking smartphone internet access for just two weeks significantly improved mental health, well-being and attention span. Why? Because without constant mobile internet, people spent more time socialising in person, exercising and going outdoors. What this means is that reducing constant connectivity can lead to real, measurable psychological benefits. Simple strategies can help: stop watching more than two videos without a break, intentionally choose unrelated content and use timers or reminders to break the binge. Small actions can go a long way. Historically, we've regulated addictive substances and behaviours – tobacco, gambling, narcotics – because willpower alone wasn't enough. The same goes for digital addiction. We need institutional we let tools like ChatGPT do the thinking, we risk turning off the very parts of our brain that make us human. But digital addiction – precisely because it's manageable – is the fight we can take on now, especially for teenagers, whose minds are still under construction. So, dear tech billionaires: You've made your billions, changed the world and redefined connection. Isn't that enough? Maybe it's time to curb the greed and rethink the design choices that keep us hooked. Do it for humanity. Do it for the future. Or at the very least – do it for your own kids. A note to myself: Let's stop blindly clicking (and counting) hearts and start confronting the reality behind the glowing screen. Look out the window – the sun, the clouds, the trees, even the people on the street. They're just as fleeting as a TikTok video, but far more real. And the best part? You'll never get addicted to them. — The Korea Herald/ANN Lim Woong is a professor at the Graduate School of Education at Yonsei University in Seoul.
The Star
8 hours ago
- The Star
People are starting to sound like AI, research shows
Machine learning - or machine teaching? Our everyday speech is increasingly being influenced by AI chatbots, which have a preference for certain words and phrases that are now rubbing off on us, researchers say. — Photo: Klaus-Dietmar Gabbert/dpa BERLIN: Artificial intelligence chatbots have largely been 'trained' by being fed reams of information from the internet, some of it the outcome of years of hard work by some of the world's leading doers and thinkers. But now it seems that it is people – including university lecturers and others described as intellectuals – who are being trained by AI, even if unwittingly. A team of researchers based at Germany's Max Planck Institute for Human Development have analysed over a million recent academic talks and podcast episodes, finding what they described as a "measurable" and "abrupt" increase in the use of words that are "preferentially generated" by ChatGPT. The team claimed their work provides "the first large-scale empirical evidence that AI-driven language shifts are propagating beyond written text into spontaneous spoken communication." After sifting through 360,000 YouTube broadcasts and twice as many podcasts, the researchers found that since the launch of ChatGPT in 2022, speakers have become increasingly inclined to pepper their broadcasts with words that the chatbot uses regularly, such as delve, comprehend, boast, swift and meticulous. The team's research suggests that AI's "linguistic influence" is spreading beyond academia, science and technology, where early use of large language models was more common, to education and business. Not only is the shift detectable in the "scripted or formal speech" heard in lectures posted on YouTube, but it can also be found in more "conversational" or off-the-cuff podcasting, according to the team, which warned that the machines' growing influence could erode "linguistic and cultural diversity." In similar findings released in Science Advances, an "extensive word analysis" of medical research papers published between 2010 and 2024 showed "an abrupt increase in the frequency of certain style words" after AI tools were made widely available. Last year, according to the research led by Germany's University of Tübingen, "at least 13.5%" of biomedical papers bore the hallmarks of being "processed by LLMs." – dpa
The Sun
a day ago
- The Sun
Google to pay $2.4 billion in deal to license tech of Windsurf, WSJ reports
GOOGLE has agreed to pay about $2.4 billion in a deal to license the technology of artificial intelligence-assisted coding tool Windsurf, The Wall Street Journal reported on Friday, citing people familiar with the matter. Reuters could not immediately confirm the report. Earlier on Friday, a Google spokesperson told Reuters that the company has hired Windsurf CEO Varun Mohan, co-founder Douglas Chen, and select members of the coding tool's research and development team to join its DeepMind division, in a move to strengthen itself in the race for AI leadership - REUTERS
