Sue Azari, Industry Lead eCommerce at AppsFlyerAsk any marketer in the GCC what one of the biggest trends they were hearing about five years ago, and most would give you the same answer: superapps. Not as a vague aspiration, but as a near-certainty. The logic was sound, the regional appetite was real, and the blueprint was sitting right there.
WeChat had already demonstrated that a single unified interface, stitching together payments, messaging, commerce, and services, could fundamentally reshape how consumers move through their daily lives.
With near-universal smartphone penetration, a young and digitally native population, serious capital, and genuine regional ambition, it appeared the GCC had everything needed to follow suit.
Consequently, Careem expanded well beyond ride-hailing into payments and delivery while Noon built deep capabilities across marketplace, fulfillment, and logistics, growing into a true commerce ecosystem. The progress was real and the execution serious.
But just as those early successes were mounting, a different kind of connective layer began to emerge.
The interface that arrived differently
Earlier this year, Carrefour became the first major global retailer to enable transactions directly through ChatGPT. A shopper can now ask for dinner ideas, refine choices around dietary needs and budget, and complete a purchase without once leaving the conversation.
This is not an isolated experiment. It reflects a broader shift in how consumers are choosing to discover, evaluate, and buy, and the evidence that this trend is taking hold in this region is hard to ignore.
Deloitte found that 58 per cent of consumers in the UAE and KSA had used generative AI tools such as ChatGPT or Google Gemini, a significantly higher rate than most European markets. LLMs are beginning to act as the connective layer that superapps once promised to be.
They sit across existing channels and shape the purchase journey before a consumer ever reaches a brand’s owned properties.
A different kind of power dynamic
It is worth understanding what this shift actually means for marketing strategy. Superapps, by their nature, are built around centralisation.
The model works by aggregating demand and supply through a single interface, which means visibility and placement are governed by the platform.
Larger brands with the resources for preferred integrations and prominent placement thrive in that environment. That is not a flaw in the model; it is simply how centralised ecosystems function.
Conversational AI works on different terms. At present, visibility in a ChatGPT recommendation or a Google AI Mode response is not purchased but earned, through the quality, depth, and structure of a brand’s content and information architecture. An LLM surfaces a product because it can find reliable, well-organised, authoritative information about it.
This raises a practical point here that marketers should not overlook. Securing integration into a superapp ecosystem takes commercial negotiation, technical development, and usually significant scale.
Optimising for conversational AI depends on developing clear product content, maintaining consistent brand messaging, and making sure the brand answers customer questions well across every channel. The capabilities are familiar. What has changed is where they need to be applied.
Measurement is the new battleground
Of course, conversational commerce is not the only force reshaping the channel map. Today, a customer in the GCC might move through a TikTok feed, a ChatGPT conversation, a Noon product page, and a physical store visit in the course of a single purchase.
As channels multiply and merge, connecting the dots across those fragmented journeys becomes the central challenge.
When discovery happens in a chatbot, validation happens in a social thread, and conversion happens in an app, traditional last-click reporting becomes not just less useful, but actively misleading for budget decisions.
LLMs add another layer of complexity. Most brands can only observe LLM-driven traffic once it lands on owned properties.
A practical starting point is to treat AI search as a first-class input alongside SEO and onsite search, compiling the most common AI-driven phrases and prompts in a given category and feeding them into content and merchandising workflows so the brand’s answers are consistent wherever a customer finds them.
For GCC brands specifically, Arabic-language content deserves serious attention. Only 3 per cent of global online content is in Arabic, which means the space is far less contested than in English. The structural advantage available to early movers here is real and still largely unclaimed.
From an attribution standpoint, the goal is to make these journeys visible enough to act on. That starts with ensuring analytics can identify traffic arriving from LLM sources, then pairing it with incremental measurement approaches so decisions are not driven solely by click-level signals.
As paid formats develop inside conversational interfaces, with Amazon’s Rufus already heading in that direction and OpenAI having quietly launched an ads manager for ChatGPT, brands will need the same rigour they apply to search and social today.
Consistent naming, clean landing experiences, and incrementality frameworks that hold up under scrutiny will separate the brands that lead from those that follow.
The opportunity is now
The superapp chapter taught the region that consumer behaviour does not always follow the infrastructure bet. GCC shoppers did not wait for a unified platform.
They built their own multi-channel journeys across whatever tools worked best for them. Conversational AI is now beginning to sit across all of those journeys in a way no single app ever managed.
For marketers, the immediate goal is not to rebuild every channel strategy from scratch, but to build readiness.
That means investing in content that answers real questions with genuine depth, structuring information so AI systems can find and surface it accurately, and putting measurement frameworks in place that can account for journeys beginning in a conversation and ending in a conversion.
By Sue Azari, Industry Lead eCommerce at AppsFlyer
