The Southeast Asian super app reported earnings Tuesday (Nov. 3) showing a 27% increase in revenue, capping a quarter that also saw its three core operating segments — mobility, deliveries and financial services — reach profitability simultaneously for the first time.
During an earnings call, management said a core pillar of Grab’s strategy involves embedding artificial intelligence directly into daily consumer touchpoints and merchant operations.
The company teamed with Meta to pilot the company’s Muse artificial intelligence assistant in Singapore, letting customers build GrabMart grocery baskets directly within chat interfaces before completing checkout inside the Grab app.
Grab is also collaborating with OpenAI to equip 30,000 drivers and merchant partners with practical AI tools across the region.
“The results are already measurable,” CEO Anthony Tan said, noting that “merchants using our AI assistants see about 20% uplift. Drivers who use it earn over 10% more per online hour.”
However, the chief executive stressed that no matter how the company’s digital operations evolve, physical infrastructure remains prime.
“As AI agents become a new way for consumers to transact, every order they place still needs to be fulfilled on the ground through the drivers, the merchants, and logistics, and licenses we have built for over more than a decade,” Tan said.
“With over 20 billion cumulative transactions on our platform, our models have a deep real-world understanding of how Southeast Asia moves, eats, shops, and borrows.”
Aside from AI, Grab is seeing shifts in customer behavior toward multi-service engagement. Users ordering across both GrabFood and GrabMart now account for 43% of food gross merchandise value (GMV), with these customers’ average basket sizes around 10% larger than single-vertical shoppers.
Grocery GMV is expanding at a rate 1.8 times faster than prepared food delivery, supported by the launch of GrabMall, a branded retail commerce channel leveraging last-mile quick commerce fulfillment.
Management said Grab is looking ahead to its planned acquisition of Singapore-based buy now, pay later provider Atome Financial. This follows the company’s recently thwarted effort to move into Taiwan.
“It really opens up a great opportunity in terms of the ecosystem,” Grab Chief Financial Officer Peter Oey said of the Atome deal. “It is also a sizable acquisition that we are doing.”
In an interview with The Wall Street Journal posted Tuesday, Oey offered more detail about the size of the acquisition, saying it would be Grab’s second largest on record.
