At Grab‘s first-ever product event, GrabX, Group CEO and Co-Founder Anthony Tan revealed the company’s ambitious vision for the future—one firmly centered around artificial intelligence but with a distinctly human touch.
The April 8, 2025 event showcased Grab’s new guiding philosophy: “AI-First with Heart.” As Tan explained, this approach isn’t merely about scaling operations more efficiently, but rather asking a more fundamental question: “What are the problems that our communities face that we can solve X times better with AI?”
AI Merchant Assistant Leads Innovation Lineup
One of the demos featured “Mai,” initially presented as one of Grab’s top-performing account managers. Mai was shown providing helpful, fast, and empathetic support to a struggling merchant—before Tan revealed the twist: Mai is actually Grab’s AI Merchant Assistant.
This AI solution emerged from the company’s intensive “G/AI Sprint” initiative, during which Grab paused normal operations for nine weeks to fully immerse the entire organization in generative AI technologies. Tan described the AI Merchant Assistant as “like giving every merchant a COO, CFO, CMO, even a life coach—available on demand, at their fingertips, 24/7.”
Enhanced Safety Through Advanced AI
The event also highlighted how AI is transforming Grab’s approach to user safety—a core mission since the company’s founding 13 years ago. Despite achieving an impressive 99.99% incident-free rate for rides and deliveries, Tan emphasized their commitment to further improvement.
Grab demonstrated new safety innovations that also leverage large language models to analyze audio and sentiment in real-time, potentially detecting distress signals during rides. “Safety used to be about tracking numbers in the backend. Or about how many incidents we could prevent,” Tan explained. “But now, safety is literally about being able to respond to an individual’s voice… When they need help, we can intervene in real-time.”
Strategic AI Partnerships
To advance its AI ambitions, Grab also announced a deepened partnership with OpenAI and a new strategic relationship with Anthropic. Both aim to push AI capabilities forward by fine-tuning advanced models with Grab’s extensive Southeast Asian data and insights.
The company is particularly focused on “agentic AI”—described as the next evolution in generative AI—to create applications that help drivers and merchant partners plan smarter and increase their earnings.
Rooted in Southeast Asian Ground Truths
Tan reaffirmed that Grab’s success will still continue to depend on deep understanding of local markets. He emphasized the importance of being immersed in “the bustle of wet markets, on the back of habal-habal motorbikes, and deep in tier 2 and 3 cities” to build products that truly serve Southeast Asian communities.
“The best products aren’t built from behind a screen. They’re built by listening, and by getting close to the people we serve,” Tan stated, reinforcing Grab’s commitment to solving real problems for real people across the region, now with AI as a powerful new tool in their arsenal.
For more of what was revealed during the event, click here. For more information on Grab and its products, click here.
Emman has been writing technical and feature articles since 2010. Prior to this, he became one of the instructors at Asia Pacific College in 2008, and eventually landed a job as Business Analyst and Technical Writer at Integrated Open Source Solutions for almost 3 years.
