Grab CEO Anthony Tan on AI-first innovations with heart and purpose

This isn’t a real recording, but it is something that could happen in rides, even if rare.

Now, many of you know our story. We started Grab 13 years ago with a simple mission: to make mobility safer, especially for women and children. We’ve relentlessly pursued that mission, implementing industry-first solutions like ride tracking and a host of other safety measures.

We’ve seen great results. Today, 99.99% of our rides and deliveries are incident-free. But even one incident is one too many. We always ask ourselves: ‘Can we do more?’

With the advancements in AI, the answer is absolutely yes!

Large language models can now analyse audio and sentiment in real-time, like the cry for help you just heard. When incidents happen, even if rare, we study each one to understand what happened, and whether there were any signs of danger. We then use these insights to train AI models to detect trouble in a car, such as a heated argument, tires screeching, or sounds of distress.

With the help of AI, we’re pushing the boundaries of safety innovation even further. Safety used to be about tracking numbers in the backend. Or about how many incidents we could prevent. But now, safety is literally about being able to respond to an individual’s voice. It’s about real people with real voices. When they need help, we can intervene in real-time

This is what it means for Grab to be “AI First with Heart”.

But we know we can’t—and shouldn’t try—to do everything alone. We’re not building foundational models. But here’s the thing, even the smartest AI models need to be trained with quality data. It needs to know about our region, Southeast Asia. That’s where we come in.

That’s why we are co-creating with world-class AI partners.

I am excited to announce we are deepening our partnership with OpenAI, and welcoming Anthropic as a new strategic partner.

By working with two of the world’s leading AI research organisations, we will push the boundaries of their models, and fine-tune them with our unique expertise and data insights, including those that only we have from serving millions of Southeast Asian users and partners every day. Together, we’re building frontier AI applications to empower communities.

In fact, we are embracing agentic AI—the next evolution in generative AI to unlock new possibilities for our driver- and merchant-partners, and help them plan smarter, and ultimately earn more.

The AI Merchant Assistant you saw earlier is a great example. It’s like giving every merchant a COO, CFO, CMO, and even a life coach— available on demand, at their fingertips, 24/7.

Looking ahead, emerging technology will continue to open up new paths. Some we can’t even imagine today. But the core essence of Grab—what Grab is really about—will always stay the same.

We’re about driving innovation—even invention— that’s rooted in solving real, societal user problems. Problems we uncover by immersing ourselves in ground truths—in the bustle of wet markets, on the back of habal-habal motorbikes, and deep in Tier 2 and 3 cities that take hours—and multiple modes of transport—to reach.

Because we know the best products aren’t built from behind a screen. They’re built by listening and by getting close to the people we serve.

This is our core DNA: To solve real problems, for real people.

And that’s what we hope to show you at GrabX—not just today, but in the many years to come.

We appreciate all of you for partnering us to build a better world, one innovation at a time.

Thank you so much for being here.