{"id":242163,"date":"2025-05-02T12:27:48","date_gmt":"2025-05-02T04:27:48","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.grab.com\/sg\/?post_type=editorial&p=242163"},"modified":"2025-11-18T16:57:13","modified_gmt":"2025-11-18T08:57:13","slug":"leveling-the-playing-field-with-ai","status":"publish","type":"editorial","link":"https:\/\/www.grab.com\/sg\/inside-grab\/stories\/leveling-the-playing-field-with-ai\/","title":{"rendered":"Leveling the playing field with AI"},"content":{"rendered":"\t\t
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Artificial intelligence is reshaping how businesses compete\u2014but until now, its benefits have mostly been reserved for large corporations with the budgets and expertise to harness it.<\/p>

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.<\/p>

At Grab, we believe AI should work for everyone<\/a>. That\u2019s why we\u2019re 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\u2019re helping millions of everyday earners across Southeast Asia tap into the AI revolution and benefit from it.<\/p>

Small merchants, big possibilities<\/h5>

We launched AI Merchant Assistant<\/a>, 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.<\/p>

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.<\/p>

This gives small merchants access to enterprise-grade insights, all without needing deep technical know-how or big budgets.<\/p>\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t

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AI Merchant Assistant supports small business owners with customised tips and suggestions<\/figcaption>\n\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/figure>\n\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t
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Take Yani Sardini, a stay-at-home mother in Jakarta who runs a small gado-gado stall\u2014a type of vegetable dish with peanut sauce that\u2019s popular in Indonesia.\u00a0 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.<\/p>

Yani was unsure at first. She didn\u2019t 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.<\/p>

With that help, she launched Gado Gado Udang and Gado Gado Daging, co-created with AI\u2014and they quickly became customer favorites.<\/p>

\u201cIt\u2019s like chatting with someone during my free time\u2014no need to make appointments or leave the house,\u201d Yani says. \u201cThis is my first time using AI, and it\u2019s amazing what it can do.\u201d<\/p>

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\u2019s gross merchandise value. We want them to continue to thrive and hold their own in a competitive landscape.<\/p>

Smarter driving with Ride Guidance<\/h5>

We\u2019re also harnessing AI to enhance productivity for driver-partners.<\/p>

In 2024, we introduced an\u00a0AI-powered Ride Guidance<\/a>\u00a0tool that predicts real-time ride demand across Southeast Asian cities. It uses historical trends, live data, and local signals\u2014like time of day, weather, and events\u2014to offer personalized guidance to driver-partners.<\/p>\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t

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AI-powered Ride Guidance helps driver-partners make smart decisions to maximise their earnings<\/figcaption>\n\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/figure>\n\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t
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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.<\/p>

In short: Driver-partners spend more time earning and less time waiting.<\/p>

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.<\/p>

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.<\/p>

At the same time, consumers benefit too, with faster, more reliable ride availability.<\/p>

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.<\/p>

Driving digital inclusion<\/h5>

AI at Grab isn\u2019t about automation for its own sake, it\u2019s about empowerment. We\u2019re building accessible, human-centered tools that help small businesses grow and help drivers succeed, no matter their background or goals.<\/p>

Digital inclusion means more than internet access. It means giving people real tools to improve their lives, on their terms. With AI, we\u2019re making that a reality\u2014partner by partner, ride by ride, dish by dish.<\/p>\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/section>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t","protected":false},"parent":180237,"menu_order":0,"template":"grab21-default","acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.grab.com\/sg\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/editorial\/242163"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.grab.com\/sg\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/editorial"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.grab.com\/sg\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/editorial"}],"version-history":[{"count":16,"href":"https:\/\/www.grab.com\/sg\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/editorial\/242163\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":242182,"href":"https:\/\/www.grab.com\/sg\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/editorial\/242163\/revisions\/242182"}],"up":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.grab.com\/sg\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/editorial\/180237"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.grab.com\/sg\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=242163"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}