45 million AI users: Vietnam's adoption is already at scale

Vietnam has 45 million generative AI users, equal to 65% of its workforce, according to the e-Conomy SEA report for Vietnam published on 5 November by Google, Temasek and Bain & Company. That share is higher than Thailand's 63% and lower than Singapore's 70% and Malaysia's 68%. The number that matters more is the next one: 26% of the workforce uses AI in their work, the highest share in Southeast Asia.

Adoption at that scale is no longer a curiosity. Two in five AI users in Vietnam open an AI tool every day, and together they generate about 31 billion queries a year — the region's highest frequency of engagement with generative AI, according to the report. The average user works with at least five different AI tools, and four in five say they would delegate shopping to an AI agent.

The language signal

Vietnamese accounts for 80% of AI conversations in the country, the highest share among the six largest Southeast Asian economies. That is the most interesting figure in the report, because it says something about fit rather than enthusiasm: people use AI in the language they think in, not the one the model was trained on first.

It also explains the demand the researchers point at. Some 17% of Vietnamese users' Gemini prompts are for learning. When a tool answers well in Vietnamese, it becomes a study aid, a writing assistant and a work tool in the same week.

The money behind the habit

Vietnam's digital economy is expected to reach $49 billion in gross merchandise value in 2026, up 20% from a year earlier, against 17% growth for Southeast Asia as a whole. That puts Vietnam among the region's fastest-growing markets, alongside Malaysia.

E-commerce does most of the work: $32 billion in GMV this year, with platforms increasingly using AI to personalise shopping, help sellers reach buyers and optimise operations. Online travel, digital media, ride-hailing and food delivery continue to grow as well.

What to do with the numbers

For Vietnamese companies, 45 million users is not a marketing statistic. It sets an expectation: customers and staff already ask AI first, in Vietnamese, several times a day. Products that answer badly in Vietnamese, or that hide the assistant behind an English interface, are competing against the habit their own users already have.

The second-order effect is agentic. If four in five users are willing to hand shopping to an agent, the interface that matters becomes the one the agent can read: clean product data, clear prices, honest availability, and a checkout that does not break when a machine is the customer.

The report's caution is implicit. Penetration of 65% of the workforce and 26% actual use at work describe two different things — reach and depth. Vietnam has won the first. The next year is about the second.

Source: e-Conomy SEA 2026 Vietnam report by Google, Temasek and Bain & Company, published 5 November 2026, as reported by VnExpress.

Author

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