Komsan Chiyadis
GrabFood delivery-partner, Thailand
AI in action
Product innovation
Tracing our impact
Marketplace principles
Inside scoop
Leveling the playing field with AI
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May 2, 2025
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Regional
Artificial intelligence is reshaping how businesses compete—but until now, its benefits have mostly been reserved for large corporations with the budgets and expertise to harness it.
Small merchants and gig workers often lack the resources to invest in advanced technology, making it harder to grow their income or stay competitive in fast-moving markets. This deepens the digital divide, leaving smaller players at a growing disadvantage.
At Grab, we believe AI should work for everyone. That’s why we’re building accessible, AI-powered tools into our platform to help small business owners thrive on GrabFood and GrabMart, and to support driver-partners in making smarter, more efficient decisions on the road. From predictive ride guidance to personalised business insights, we’re helping millions of everyday earners across Southeast Asia tap into the AI revolution and benefit from it.
Small merchants, big possibilities
We launched AI Merchant Assistant, a smart chatbot integrated into the GrabMerchant app. It acts as a co-pilot for business owners, providing real-time recommendations, answering questions, and helping with everything from setting up marketing campaigns to adding AI-generated photos and descriptions to menus.
AI Merchant Assistant does this by drawing from Large Language Models (LLMs) with their foundational knowledge, Grab-specific domain expertise, as well as merchant-specific operational and transactional data, making it a highly personalised tool for each individual merchant.
This gives small merchants access to enterprise-grade insights, all without needing deep technical know-how or big budgets.
Take Yani Sardini, a stay-at-home mother in Jakarta who runs a small gado-gado stall—a type of vegetable dish with peanut sauce that’s popular in Indonesia. When she started using AI Merchant Assistant, it suggested she try premium versions of her dishes, like shrimp and beef gado-gado, based on customer data.
Yani was unsure at first. She didn’t know how to prepare those dishes. But the Assistant walked her through the steps, even offering plating tips and packaging suggestions to keep fried items crispy.
With that help, she launched Gado Gado Udang and Gado Gado Daging, co-created with AI—and they quickly became customer favorites.
“It’s like chatting with someone during my free time—no need to make appointments or leave the house,” Yani says. “This is my first time using AI, and it’s amazing what it can do.”
And this discovery process is now happening at a mass-scale. In 2024 alone, we onboarded 600,000 micro, small and medium businesses onto GrabFood and GrabMart! These MSME contributed 67% of GrabFood and GrabMart’s gross merchandise value. We want them to continue to thrive and hold their own in a competitive landscape.
Smarter driving with Ride Guidance
We’re also harnessing AI to enhance productivity for driver-partners.
In 2024, we introduced an AI-powered Ride Guidance tool that predicts real-time ride demand across Southeast Asian cities. It uses historical trends, live data, and local signals—like time of day, weather, and events—to offer personalized guidance to driver-partners.
With this tool, drivers receive smart suggestions on where to go next to find more jobs and avoid high-competition areas. This means less idle time, more earning opportunities, and greater efficiency on the road.
In short: Driver-partners spend more time earning and less time waiting.
This feature also supports our mission to bring a new cohort of driver-partners with diverse backgrounds onto the platform, including more women drivers and drivers with disabilities.
Ride Guidance is particularly useful to new driver-partners who are less experienced with navigating the demand patterns in their city, or driver-partners who balance driving for Grab with other tasks and responsibilities throughout the day.
At the same time, consumers benefit too, with faster, more reliable ride availability.
135,000 Partners With Disabilities (PWDs) and women driver-partners earned an income through Grab in 2024. We hope to teach even more PWD and women drivers this year.
Driving digital inclusion
AI at Grab isn’t about automation for its own sake, it’s about empowerment. We’re building accessible, human-centered tools that help small businesses grow and help drivers succeed, no matter their background or goals.
Digital inclusion means more than internet access. It means giving people real tools to improve their lives, on their terms. With AI, we’re making that a reality—partner by partner, ride by ride, dish by dish.
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Komsan Chiyadis
GrabFood delivery-partner, Thailand
COVID-19 has dealt an unprecedented blow to the tourism industry, affecting the livelihoods of millions of workers. One of them was Komsan, an assistant chef in a luxury hotel based in the Srinakarin area.
As the number of tourists at the hotel plunged, he decided to sign up as a GrabFood delivery-partner to earn an alternative income. Soon after, the hotel ceased operations.
Komsan has viewed this change through an optimistic lens, calling it the perfect opportunity for him to embark on a fresh journey after his previous job. Aside from GrabFood deliveries, he now also picks up GrabExpress jobs. It can get tiring, having to shuttle between different locations, but Komsan finds it exciting. And mostly, he’s glad to get his income back on track.
