AS Watson and Watsons Malaysia Win Three Retail Asia Awards 2026, Showcasing AI-Powered O+O Retail Transformation

The company was recognised for its leadership in AI-powered, customer-centric O+O retail.

AS Watson Group and Watsons Malaysia have won three accolades at the Retail Asia Awards 2026 — Digital Transformation of the Year - Hong Kong, Innovation Team of the Year - Hong Kong, and AI Initiative of the Year - Malaysia.

The wins underscore how AS Watson is redefining the health and beauty retail landscape by transforming its 17,000 stores across 31 markets into intelligent hubs, with DataLab’s recognition highlighting its role in empowering teams with AI, analytics, and data-led decision-making to deliver more connected customer experiences.

Transforming stores into connected customer experience hubs

At the heart of AS Watson’s transformation is its Intelligent Store model, which embeds data, intelligence, and automation into everyday retail operations. This closed-loop system utilises five core capabilities: Assist, which helps store operators access operational guidance and manuals quickly; Automate, which streamlines merchandising work; Listen, which captures customer behaviour and in-store insights; Connect, which links offline and online customer touchpoints; and Train, which builds colleague capability through AI-enabled learning. Together, these capabilities bring customer understanding, store execution and frontline empowerment into one connected model, generating real-time insights, supporting personalised engagement and improving customer experiences at scale.

A key example is AS Watson’s GenAI Store Copilot, which helps frontline colleagues access operational knowledge and service guidance within seconds. Rolled out across multiple markets, the tool reduces training dependency, improves response speed, and enables store teams to serve customers with greater confidence.

In stores, AS Watson uses video analytics to better understand customer behaviour and optimise layouts based on real-time insights. By identifying how customers move, browse, and interact with products, the technology helps teams improve product visibility, strengthen engagement, and create more effective store experiences. Together with AI-driven space optimisation, it also supports more consistent merchandising execution and stronger in-store performance.

The company also focuses on the customer journey through AI-powered personalisation. Virtual beauty advisors and a unified One Customer View connect data across touchpoints, enabling more relevant recommendations, more seamless engagement, and stronger customer relationships across offline and online channels.

DataLab: empowering AI through connected data and collaboration

These innovations are underpinned by DataLab, the transformation engine behind AS Watson’s digitalisation journey. Built over 15 years, DataLab has evolved from setting up foundational business intelligence and customer data capabilities to enabling AI and decision intelligence across markets.

Through close collaboration with business and technology teams, DataLab has continuously refined data pipelines, strengthened governance and embedded analytics into everyday workflows. This has created a robust, connected data foundation that powers AI-enabled insights at scale and supports the seamless integration of offline plus online (O+O) customer experiences.

Beyond technology, DataLab’s impact lies in how it helps transform ways of working. By empowering teams with data, AI and practical tools, it enables innovation to scale through close collaboration with business units across markets. PromoRight in Watsons Malaysia is one such example, showing how DataLab’s AI capabilities are put into use with local business teams to deliver measurable commercial impact.

AI-powered promotion optimisation in Malaysia

In Malaysia, Watsons showed how AS Watson is embedding AI into core commercial decision-making through PromoRight, an AI-powered promotion optimisation solution. Operating over 800 stores nationwide, Watsons Malaysia faced the challenge of improving promotional effectiveness across an extensive product portfolio in a highly competitive, promotion-driven retail landscape. Traditional evaluation methods often relied on simple sales comparisons and did not fully account for factors such as cannibalisation, pull-forward demand, halo effects, and changing market dynamics.

PromoRight addresses this by creating a dynamic AI-generated sales baseline, helping teams understand what performance would have been without a promotion. The model evaluates performance at a granular level across products, promotions, stores, and time periods, whilst incorporating variables such as seasonality, holidays, market trends, and external conditions. This enables teams to isolate the true incremental value of each promotion and make more confident commercial decisions.

Embedded into daily commercial workflows, PromoRight enables teams across trading, marketing, and merchandising to move from retrospective reporting to predictive and prescriptive insights. Near real-time dashboards allow users to evaluate performance, drill down into product-level insights and refine promotional strategies with speed and precision. The platform also strengthens collaboration with brand partners by enabling more transparent, data-led conversations around promotion planning and effectiveness.

Watsons Malaysia achieved measurable gains in promotional efficiency, alongside meaningful productivity improvements from reduced manual reporting. Adoption also increased significantly over the year, reflecting a broader cultural shift towards data-led decision-making across the organisation. Looking ahead, PromoRight’s simulation capabilities will allow teams to test and refine strategies before implementation, whilst its data-sharing functionality will support more effective co-created promotions with brand partners.

The Retail Asia Awards highlights the pinnacle of excellence, innovation, and leadership within the retail industry across the Asia Pacific region. It serves as a benchmark of success, honouring companies and individuals who have made remarkable contributions to shaping the future of retail.

The Retail Asia Awards is presented by Retail Asia Magazine. To view the full list of winners, click here. If you want to join the 2027 awards programme and be acclaimed for your company's exceptional products or initiatives in the Retail industry, please contact Marni Marco at [email protected].