Singapore – Around 53% of consumers in the region use AI for personalised product recommendations, while 74% of brands cite data integration and quality issues as key barriers to scaling agentic AI initiatives. This is according to the latest data from Adobe.
According to the findings, 42% of consumers in Asia Pacific said they would interact with a brand’s AI agent if one were offered. However, 35% said they had not yet considered the idea of a personal AI agent, while 16% said they were not open to personal AI agents at all.
More than half of respondents (53%) said they use AI for personalised product recommendations, while 48% use AI for instant customer support and 42% are open to shopping through a virtual AI concierge.
Adobe said the findings suggest agentic AI is becoming more embedded in everyday consumer interactions, creating what it described as a key moment for brands to establish governance and operational frameworks for long-term AI deployment.
The report also pointed to a disconnect between how consumers and businesses define successful AI experiences. Consumers were found to prioritise trust, transparency, and whether their needs are met, while many organisations continue to focus on operational efficiency and cost reduction.
“Consumer behaviours are shifting across Asia Pacific, with AI already rising in brand discovery and now set to play a greater role in purchasing journeys. Many consumers are comfortable with agentic AI, but say adoption relies on defined, transparent contexts with options for human support,” said Duncan Egan, Vice President of Enterprise Marketing, Asia Pacific and Japan, Adobe.
“For many organisations, AI is already delivering meaningful improvements to experience delivery and customer growth. Early results from generative AI are translating into accelerated agentic adoption. However, while enthusiasm for agentic AI is high, most brands still need to build the data, governance and orchestration capabilities that will allow these efforts to scale.”
Among consumer expectations around AI use, the ability to switch to a human representative at any time ranked as the most important reassurance factor for respondents at 26%, followed by clear labelling of AI interactions at 24%.
The report found that 47% of consumers said they do not mind whether they are interacting with AI as long as their needs are met. However, 38% said they would stop engaging with a brand if they later discovered they had been speaking with AI when they had expected a human.
Consumers also indicated that AI-driven personalisation can improve convenience and efficiency. More than half (54%) said AI-powered personalisation frequently saves them time, while 55% described such experiences as convenient. At the same time, 70% said AI interactions should still feel human rather than robotic.
Adobe’s research further showed increasing openness to autonomous AI interactions. Nearly half of respondents (46%) said they would trust an AI agent to interact with a brand’s human representative on their behalf, while 36% said they were already comfortable with agent-to-agent interactions.
On the enterprise side, the report noted that organisations continue to face implementation challenges despite growing adoption. While 14% of brands said they had embedded agentic AI into customer support operations and 12% into brand discovery and search, 74% cited data integration and data quality as major barriers to scaling AI initiatives.
Meanwhile, 46% of organisations said their current data quality and accessibility were sufficient for AI deployment, while 44% reported having a shared customer data platform to support agentic AI efforts.
The report also highlighted a gap between executive strategy and operational execution. Only 22% of Asia Pacific brands reported strong alignment between executives setting AI vision and practitioners responsible for implementation.
Generative AI, however, was reported to be delivering productivity gains. Three-quarters of organisations (75%) said generative AI improved the speed and volume of content ideation and production, while 71% said it enabled non-creative teams to produce content.
Adobe’s findings also pointed to shrinking consumer attention spans in digital environments. More than half of respondents (52%) said brands have between two and five seconds to capture their interest, while 17% said they decide whether to engage in under two seconds.
The study found that AI-powered search and discovery tools are also becoming increasingly influential in purchasing behaviour. Around 28% of consumers now cite AI-powered platforms as their primary research tool, ahead of brand websites and reviews. More than half (58%) said they use AI assistants as a primary information source at least some of the time.
Among regional markets, Australia and New Zealand recorded the highest rate of organisations identifying high-value AI applications at 70%, while 76% reported increased content production speed and volume through generative AI. However, many organisations in the market also cited data-related challenges and low executive-practitioner alignment.
India showed the strongest consumer openness to agentic AI in the region, with 58% of consumers comfortable with agent-to-agent interactions and 61% willing to allow AI agents to interact with brand representatives on their behalf. The report noted that these figures exceeded both business expectations in India and levels seen in other Asia Pacific markets.
In Singapore, the findings suggested a more cautious approach to autonomous AI. Only 33% of consumers said they were comfortable with agent-to-agent interactions, while 27% said clear labelling was the most important factor in AI engagement. However, Singapore also recorded higher executive-practitioner alignment than regional peers, with 28% describing their organisations as highly aligned on AI execution.
