Sea Limited has deployed OpenAI's Codex across its entire development organization, with 87% of users becoming weekly active users according to internal data shared by the Singapore-based tech giant.

David Chen, co-founder of Sea and chief product officer at its e-commerce arm Shopee, described the rollout as more than a productivity tool. "Agentic AI coding tools like Codex are not just about improving localized productivity," Chen said in an interview published on OpenAI's blog. "They represent a structural multiplier."

Sea operates digital entertainment, e-commerce, and financial services across Southeast Asia's fragmented markets. Chen highlighted Codex's ability to navigate the company's complex microservices architecture, reducing time spent tracing dependencies and understanding legacy systems.

The company's developers are using Codex primarily for code understanding, debugging, and feature development. Chen noted that AI agents are increasingly integrated into Sea's CI/CD pipelines, "reasoning through product requirements, autonomously proposing test-driven implementations, surfacing edge cases in distributed systems."

Regional expansion plans

Sea 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 framed this as democratizing access to advanced AI development tools for the broader Southeast Asian developer community.

"Southeast Asia has an incredibly vibrant builder ecosystem, but the tooling gap has historically constrained execution speed," he said. The hackathon series aims to help local developers "move from raw curiosity to deploying scalable, AI-native applications in a matter of hours."

Chen predicted fundamental changes to engineering team structures, with developers evolving into "system orchestrators" as AI agents handle more operational execution. He emphasized this represents "an organizational paradigm shift" rather than a simple tooling upgrade.

The initiative reflects Sea's broader bet on AI-native development as Southeast Asia positions itself as a proving ground for advanced software development practices, building on the region's history of leapfrogging traditional technology adoption cycles.