Key Takeaways

  • Shopee resolves over 80% of customer support inquiries entirely through automated AI chat systems, hitting customer satisfaction scores higher than human agents.
  • Garena replaced its external concept art outsourcing with generative AI tools for Free Fire, reserving human labor strictly for final polish by senior artists.
  • With over 100 million people playing Free Fire daily, Garena matches new users against intelligent bots to build early confidence and lift onboarding retention.
  • Nearly half of Free Fire's active player base avoids multiplayer team invites; Garena assigns them AI squadmates to deliver team-based game mechanics without social friction.

Why Shopee Replaced First-Line Support with AI

Most tech leaders treat generative AI as an internal research experiment. Forrest Li put it directly in front of hundreds of millions of consumers across Southeast Asia and Latin America.

In customer service for e-commerce giant Shopee, automated systems handle the vast majority of volume from start to finish. “Today is more than 80% of the customer inquiry is 100% handled by AI,” Li stated. Even more striking is the user response: “The satisfaction rate is even higher than the human.”

Customer support on marketplaces suffers from latency, agent fatigue, and uneven training. When a buyer asks where a package is or how to initiate a refund, they do not want conversational warmth. They want an accurate resolution in twenty seconds. AI models access internal logistics APIs instantly, translate regional dialects without hesitation, and never lose patience. By letting AI take the brunt of routine inquiries, human support teams step in only when edge cases or genuine policy disputes require judgment.

Cutting Outsourcing Costs in Game Production

Garena runs Free Fire, a mobile title that Li notes attracts “more than 100 million people from all over the world” every single day. Operating a game at that scale requires a relentless pipeline of new skins, weapons, and thematic environments.

Traditionally, game studios contract large external design shops to draft initial visual ideas. Li cut that entire layer. “In the past you need to generate a lot of arts,” Li explained. “You need to have a big group of artists and to generate a concept and then draw and then you pick the things you like and you final touch it. Most of the time we outsource a part of a basic job. We only have our senior artists do the final touch. But now the outsourcing work is pretty much done by AI.”

This shift changes production economics. Instead of waiting weeks for an outsourced agency to return 50 rough sketches, internal art directors prompt specialized image models to output hundreds of variations in an afternoon. Senior artists select the best concepts, refine the 3D assets, and prepare them for engine deployment. The output volume multiplies while external contractor spend collapses to zero.

Retaining Players Through Invisible AI Bots

Scaling a competitive game creates a brutal onboarding problem: skilled veterans stomp new players immediately. Garena solves this by pairing rookies with bots, masking the automated players so the newcomer experiences early competence. As Li put it: “When you go to play a new game, most of the time you feel you are playing with another human people, but actually as a new gamer high chance you're going to play with a bot because we want to make sure the new gamers have a good boarding experience.”

Li observed a second behavioral pattern in the player base: “Almost half of the players, they have been playing the game, they enjoying the game, but they only play solo. They never really reach out to other people say let's play together or let's team up together. And now with this bot feature we just pair with them with a bot.”

Solo users gain the tactical advantages of squad play—revives, crossfire, shared objectives—without dealing with toxic voice chat or coordinating schedules. AI acts as product glue, turning single-player habits into sticky team loops.

What to Do With This

Audit your external contractor spend this week across design, content creation, and tier-one customer tickets. Identify the lowest-complexity 50% of tasks you currently send to outside agencies or outsource shops. Build a standardized prompt workflow or an API-driven automation to replace that external pipeline by Friday, keeping only your senior staff to review and finalize the output.