Sea Limited, the Singapore-based tech giant behind Shopee and digital finance services, has deployed OpenAI's Codex across its entire engineering organization. The company reports 87% weekly active user adoption among developers, marking one of the broadest enterprise rollouts of AI coding tools in Southeast Asia.

David Chen, Sea's Co-Founder and Chief Product Officer at Shopee, said the tool goes beyond autocomplete—its contextual awareness helps engineers navigate massive microservices architectures and trace dependencies across legacy systems. Developers are using Codex to "think better, not just type faster," integrating it into CI/CD pipelines for autonomous test-driven implementations and debugging. Among developers who rated the tool 4-5 out of-5, 73% would recommend it to colleagues.

The company has partnered with OpenAI to host the first regional Codex Hackathon Series across Asia, starting in Singapore before expanding to Indonesia, Taiwan, and Vietnam. Chen argues that Southeast Asia's complex, multilingual markets make it an ideal testing ground for AI-native development. Engineering teams are shifting from writing code to orchestrating AI-driven workflows—managing product judgment, system design, and coordinating automated processes rather than manual implementation.