Modern retail is often a surprisingly disjointed experience. You might use one app to buy your groceries, another to check your loyalty points, and a completely different portal to manage your store credit card. AEON360 is actively looking to tear down these digital walls. The newly formed joint venture has officially announced a multi-year collaboration with Google Cloud. The primary goal is to deliver a genuinely “continuous commerce” experience that seamlessly merges AEON’s massive retail, finance, and lifestyle ecosystems across Southeast Asia.
The Shift to Agentic Commerce
At the heart of this partnership is a concerted push toward what the companies are calling agentic commerce. Instead of forcing users to manually navigate through static menus and search bars, the system relies on active artificial intelligence to intuitively adapt to shopper intent in real-time. Daisuke Maeda, Chairman of AEON360, noted that the ambition is to shift away from simple digital interactions toward AI agents that can proactively surface relevant offerings and perform complex tasks directly on behalf of the customer.
To make this practical, AEON360 is utilising Google Cloud’s BigQuery data platform to build a comprehensive enterprise knowledge graph. This unified data foundation seamlessly reconciles a customer’s habits across all AEON entities and touchpoints. In daily use, this means a shopper looking for dinner ingredients in Kuala Lumpur will not have to re-establish their identity or preferences across different services. The system will instantly account for their specific past purchasing habits to offer curated product recommendations, apply member pricing, and check real-time stock at the nearest AEON MaxValu or via myAEON2go. Furthermore, it dynamically weaves in bespoke financing options, cashback offers, and AEON points right from the initial discovery phase through to a frictionless checkout.
Building the AI Infrastructure in Kuala Lumpur
Deploying artificial intelligence at this scale requires serious internal expertise. To support this rollout, the companies are establishing the AEON360 Innovation Foundry directly in Kuala Lumpur. This dedicated centre is designed to upskill AEON employees across various business lines with official Google skills and certifications, while providing a sandbox for teams to develop and scale new agentic AI solutions.
Through this Foundry, AEON360 will utilise Gemini Enterprise for Customer Experience to deploy highly specific AI agents. This includes a proactive shopping agent that acts as a digital concierge, capable of processing voice commands, text, and images to autonomously build shopping carts. Alongside this, a dedicated customer experience agent will handle round-the-clock inquiries while simultaneously providing live human representatives with real-time support guidance. Because these agents are anchored strictly to the company’s unified data foundation, they remain fully context-aware and capable of executing complex, multi-step actions for the user.
Bridging the Gap with Google Search
The long-term vision for this partnership extends well beyond AEON’s proprietary applications. By adopting Google’s open Universal Commerce Protocol, AEON360 plans to allow its AI agents to operate seamlessly across different consumer platforms and payment providers. This opens the door for a future where shoppers can chat directly with an AEON business agent natively within Google Search, asking product questions and receiving contextually relevant discounts during key shopping moments.
To tie the entire frictionless experience together, AEON360 is also exploring deep integrations with Google Pay. This capability would allow shoppers to effortlessly authorise these advanced agent-led transactions using the payment and shipping information already securely stored within their Google Wallet. Ultimately, this collaboration aims to transform browsing from a toilsome chore into a highly predictive, personalised journey across the entire AEON ecosystem.
