Five research modules on the forces rewriting communications across Asia Pacific — AI, social & influence, earned media, B2B and health. Built and presented to leadership teams around the region by We. Communications.
ChatGPT weekly active users — an 8× increase since 2023
of APAC business buyers use generative AI to research or compare vendors
of LLM citations are non-paid media — earned authority wins AI search
of Asian consumers have watched or purchased via livestream commerce
Each module stands alone as a leadership briefing — together they map the full communications landscape heading into 2026.
Unprecedented adoption meets measured day-to-day reality. What will the 2026 AI story be?
Read the module → 02Social & influence: fandom over followers, DMs as the new CRM, commerce as content.
Read the module → 03Zero-click AI search, social-first newsrooms and the journopreneur economy.
Read the module → 04Buying decisions are made before sales ever gets a call. Influence the shortlist or miss it.
Read the module → 05From “Dr. Google” to “Dr. ChatGPT” — how AI is transforming health communications in APAC.
Read the module →Adoption and investment are rising at unprecedented scale — but dig deeper and the day-to-day reality is more measured. Will 2026 be the year AI finally delivers transformative ROI?
APAC leads AI-agent adoption at 53% (Microsoft, 2025), and Asian audiences are the most open to AI content anywhere: 48% of APAC consumers are comfortable with AI-generated brand imagery — 55% in India and 48% in Indonesia, versus just 11% in the US and UK. APAC journalists are also the most favourable to AI-aided news and PR: 43% support PR professionals using AI, against only 10% in North America.
Only 15% of marketers have fully implemented AI into regular processes; 70% are still running initial experiments. 60% of companies have no financial metrics for AI value creation, and a study of 2,500 professionals found AI actually increased workload for 77% of workers. The biggest barriers are not tool access — they are training, clarity and direction.
LLM share of global search traffic grew 4× year on year; 63% of global websites already report traffic from AI search. With 95% of LLM citations being non-paid media, what drives citations is earned authority: authoritative sources, clear entity language, structured storytelling and recurrence across trusted sources. Measurement must evolve — from impressions and share-of-voice to share-of-model, answer position, answer sentiment and LLM conversions.
Dove is retraining beauty algorithms for inclusive narratives; AXA won a Grand Prix using AI-driven sentiment targeting; PepsiCo has declared it will be "agentic-AI first" by 2026. In China, influencer Luo Yonghao's GenAI-avatar livestream sold US$7.65M in six hours. Asian brands like Grab and Ant Group are actively inviting customers into their AI roadmaps.
AI-exacerbated misinformation is the #1 long-term global threat (WEF, 2025). Deepfake-driven social engineering rose 53% in APAC in 2024, yet only 10% of communications professionals have received deepfake training. 7 in 10 APAC consumers are concerned about how their data is collected, and at least 57 countries debated AI legislation in 2024.
Global internet users are on 6–7 platforms a month, there are more social profiles than people in several APAC markets, and modern commerce is social. The region isn't following the social future — it's writing it.
Up to 66% of brand-community members report feeling loyal to the brand. Fandom brands approach social entirely differently: Starbucks Odyssey blends membership, gaming and collectible "stamps"; PopMart's unboxing phenomenon migrated to influencer-led physical events; Louis Vuitton dropped limited-edition LINE stickers; Fenty served jianbings on Douyin to fuel selling livestreams.
Everything viral is a TikTok song. Apple Vietnam's Tết music film hit 121M views with 50K+ UGC remixes; HSBC Singapore repositioned itself with "Bread and Better" and influencer glow-up challenges; McDonald's Taiwan's Big Mac Chant challenge drove a 733% increase in social reach and 2.24M fan-chant listens in 10 days.
TikTok leads both B2C and B2B marketing investment and far outpaces other channels' engagement rates. Travel brand Jet2 Holidays went viral for vacation fails — and posted 11% passenger growth, 15% revenue growth and share buybacks while outpacing rivals.
84% of Asian consumers have watched or purchased via livestreams; TikTok Shop is helping the US and Europe catch up. Social apps are simultaneously going offline, building physical retail promoted by influencers via livestream.
Over 1.1 billion pieces of content are published daily — a figure exploding with AI slop. Deepfakes are rampant, Meta has stepped back from third-party moderation, governments are penalising platforms and influencers, and youth social-media bans are active or upcoming in multiple markets (64.7% globally think parents should limit children's social time).
Journalism is in perma-crisis — and this time AI is the new middleman. Audiences bypass outlets entirely while global trust in news sits at 40%. Earned media isn't dying; it's decentralising.
Influence has decentralised across paid, owned, earned and partnered stars — exec social, creators, newsletters, GEO, employee voices. Nearly all major news websites lost traffic this year; Substack was the only one with double-digit growth (+46.9%). Google AI Overviews now trigger for 18% of all searches, and users are 10% more likely to end their session after seeing one.
Your brand website is the official information repository — the gravity centre of LLM-indexable facts, figures, quotes and POVs. Around it: earned media as the validation engine, exec comms as the credibility layer, social as the organic driver, inbox/DMs as the direct line, community amplifiers as the organic multiplier, content partnerships as the story extender, and paid as the discovery engine.
Social and video networks have passed TV as Americans' top news source; 50%+ use YouTube for news weekly in India, Thailand, the Philippines and South Korea. Legacy outlets are going social-first — ABS-CBN halted traditional broadcast for digital; The Straits Times' TikTok explainers pull millions of views; Reuters' first social-video reporter has more than tripled TikTok followers since January.
~40% of APAC journalists are actively publishing on or considering Substack, and ex-newsroom stars like Ravish Kumar (~23M combined followers) are building social-newsletter-podcast ecosystems. The inbox is the new front page — and PR outreach must become DMs, voice notes, personalised video pitches and community AMAs.
87% of publishers say newsrooms are being transformed by GenAI: News Corp's internal NewsGPT, Rappler's Rai chatbot, Star Malaysia's Thelma Therapist, GMA's AI sports anchors, and Hangzhou TV's first fully AI-hosted broadcast. Meanwhile The Atlantic and ELLE Australia are expanding print — harder to AI-fake, easier to value — and Japan and India's print circulations remain the world's largest.
The traditional rules of corporate and B2B marketing are gone. AI avatars deliver financial results, 200 influencers post about quantum chips, and GenAI is now the #1 source influencing vendor shortlists.
Tariffs upend global trade, sanctions have tripled since 2019, and disinformation costs companies an estimated $78 billion annually. Forward-thinking companies will ascribe hard financial metrics to reputation — because reputation damage now has direct commercial impact.
68% of APAC marketers lack an effective process for identifying buying groups, and only 36% are confident they can reach target audiences (vs 46–47% in the US/EU). Meanwhile 58% of APAC B2B buyers say vendor content feels repetitive, boring or indistinguishable — and 84% use social media as a key purchase-decision source.
TikTok for human, authentic B2B stories (video delivers the highest content ROI); Reddit for community trust that also drives AI search citations; WhatsApp for entire customer-lifecycle management. Multi-image and native document posts lead LinkedIn engagement.
72% of advanced B2B teams now hold a dedicated influencer budget; 80% of B2B companies will use influencer marketing by 2027. IBM's Influencer Insights Program drove ~43M impressions and 9M+ engagements. Executive visibility is 1.5× more likely to sway B2B buyers in APAC than in the West — and 71% of consumers are likelier to buy when the CEO is active on social. Treat the entire leadership bench, and specialist employees, as an influence ecosystem.
GenAI is the #1 source influencing vendor shortlisting. With 95% of LLM citations being non-paid, brands must operate like publishers again — feeding humans and machines — and evolve KPIs from impressions and clicks to share-of-model, answer position, answer sentiment and LLM conversions. AI ranking will soon drive market share.
Healthcare faces an 11-million-worker global shortfall by 2030 and 47-day specialist wait times in APAC. AI will certainly try to solve it all — McKinsey estimates $60–110B a year in economic value from GenAI in health.
APAC clinicians are the most positive about AI globally, and physicians are more optimistic than patients that AI improves outcomes. But 75% of medical students report little or no AI knowledge, only 30% say their institutions perform well on AI training, and 57% say guidance would increase their trust. We. has helped organisations like Medtronic embed AI into comms culture with needs assessments, six-course training and custom solution testing.
Top reasons for using LLMs in a health context: faster answers (43%), understanding medication side effects (35%), preparing questions for doctor visits (31%), reducing anxiety while awaiting diagnosis (31%). Most APAC markets now field AI doctor and nurse agents — clinicians report lower burnout, patients report higher satisfaction and empathy scores.
From the EU-style comprehensive AI Acts of South Korea and Japan's AI Promotion Act, to Singapore's Model AI Governance Framework and LLM App Safety Starter Kit, India's SAHI strategy, China's NMPA AI SaMD guidelines and Thailand's 2026 AI labelling rules — highly varied regulation makes scaling health AI initiatives genuinely challenging. Public-private ecosystems (like AI Mirror contactless screening) are racing ahead where policy allows.
AI health influencers like Indonesia's "Ibu Rini" are a growing source of trusted information, with AI avatars projected to grow 30% CAGR past a US$10B market. The dark side: deepfakes of trusted doctors — from Australia's Dr. Karl to India's Dr. Naresh Trehan — are fuelling a fraud surge (+1,500% in Singapore, +1,900% in Hong Kong SAR).
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