Grab’s Anthony Tan champions “AI First, With Heart”

This is the full speech delivered by Grab CEO Anthony Tan at last week’s GrabX event.

Watch the video above, or read the complete transcript below.

---

Hi everyone. Welcome to GrabX—our first ever product event!

We have an exciting lineup of innovations to show you today. These are innovations we’ve created with our user needs front and center.

To kick things off, I want to introduce you to someone who embodies what GrabX is all about. Someone on the front lines who truly understands our partners and is making a real difference for them.

There’s none other than Mai, one of our top-performing account managers. Here’s a conversation between Mai and a merchant who’s going through a pretty tough time.

Mai is helpful, fast, and proactive. She gives great advice. And most importantly, she cares. She has so much empathy for our partners.

It’s no wonder our merchants love her.

But here’s the twist: Mai is not human. She’s our AI Merchant Assistant— a clear example of how AI can be applied to create truly game-changing benefits for our users and partners.

I’m fully committed to this. In fact, last year we embarked on an ambitious company-wide initiative: our GAI Sprint, to accelerate all of Grab to embrace GAI. Because in this world, you either disrupt or be disrupted.

So we chose to disrupt ourselves.

For 9 weeks, we paused business as usual to immerse ourselves in generative AI. We trained every Grabber, cleared space for innovation, and focused on projects that would deliver step-change impact.

One of those was the AI Merchant Assistant—a product that’s especially close to my heart because I had the privilege of building it with a team during GAI Sprint.

Now, what’s even more important is this: while we put AI at the core of how we work and what we build, we must never lose sight of who we’re building for.