Best-in-Class AI Localization: Lessons From Asia in 2025
In Asia, where language, rituals, and consumer expectations shift dramatically across borders, leading marketers are building smarter AI pipelines that scale without flattening.
- SK-II “Late Night Portraits” campaign, showcases ambassadors photographed bare-faced at night, using AI-powered visual enhancement and facial analytics to support the creative concept. The brand uniquely localized the campaign across markets. In Japan, messaging emphasized scientific rigor and minimalism, aligning with cultural preferences for proof and restraint. In Southeast Asia, the tone shifted toward storytelling and emotional relatability—matching a cultural appetite for authenticity and connection. While AI was used for aesthetics, it also provided a competitive advantage enabling SK-II to tailor execution at scale, while keeping core storytelling intact.
In 2025, generative AI is everywhere, but not all outputs are created equally. As more brands deploy AI to drive content and campaigns, a clear divide is emerging between those who treat localization as an afterthought, and those who embed cultural nuance from the start.
- Tokopedia is working at the infrastructure level. In partnership with Indosat Ooredoo Hutchison, it helped develop Sahabat-AI, a Bahasa Indonesia-first language model built to improve customer service. The goal is to move away from generic chatbot scripts and toward AI that reflects regional humor, tone, and daily speech patterns. Early pilots showed higher satisfaction scores in tier-2 cities, where users felt the AI “spoke their language”—literally and figuratively.
- Shopee continues to refine AI-generated content across its seller ecosystem. By training prompts with localized idioms and product-specific phrasing, it’s turning what could be generic descriptions into high-converting product pages.
The most successful APAC brands aren’t just scaling content faster. They’re scaling with intent, using AI as a cultural amplifier.