Scalability only becomes an enterprise burden when there is failure to prepare — a scenario that certainly does not apply to Southeast Asian super app Grab, which currently operates in eight markets: Singapore, Malaysia, Indonesia, Thailand, the Philippines, Cambodia, Myanmar, and Vietnam.
With 42 million monthly transactional users as of the last quarter of 2024, Grab continues to look for growth areas, and accompanying tech-enabled strategies to make them a reality.
During Oracle’s CloudWorld Tour in Singapore, Quinny Lei, Head of Business IT Solutions, GTS (Grabber Technology Solutions) at Grab, briefly shared about the company’s scalability challenges, as well as current initiatives to maintain its competitive edge in the market.
Starting line
Beginning in Malaysia as the MyTeksi app in 2012, the company later rebranded as GrabTaxi, launching in the Philippines and Thailand in 2013, and in Singapore in 2014.
Then came GrabBike in 2015, followed by GrabCar+ and GrabExpress. In 2018, GrabFood was born, followed by GrabMart in 2019. Today, the company has solutions for consumers, merchants, and enterprises.
“One of the biggest challenges that we have encountered is really around the expansion of the company. We are no longer organically growing. We have a lot of mergers and acquisitions that are really making it hard for us to harmonise all the different organisations back into our own platform,” Lei said.
Some of Grab’s acquisitions include Uber’s Southeast Asian operations; wealth tech start-up Bento, rebranded as GrabInvest; restaurant reservation platform Chope; and motorcycle-hailing platform Move It.
Meanwhile, the company’s second pain point is in the area of automation.
“There are still a lot of manual transactions that are happening behind the scenes, and we definitely need to look into the areas to improve in that so that we can scale faster to support the growth of the business,” Lei continued.
Partnering for growth
As early as 2016, Grab has partnered with Oracle, leveraging a suite of solutions including Cloud ERP. According to Lei, Grab is continuously working on strengthening its foundation for scalability, and with its current partnership with Oracle, the company is able to rethink its data strategy, among other efforts.
“This is one of our key opportunities to drive transformation within the organisation — we’re looking at how to revamp our data structure, redesign the chart of accounts, and overhaul our consolidation processes. We’re also bringing in more AI capabilities to enhance our narrative reporting, and introducing automation to improve productivity and efficiency,” she explained.
Back in 2019, the company announced that it had started using the Oracle Financials and Procurement Cloud modules within the Oracle Fusion Cloud ERP suite.
“As Grab expands rapidly into new markets and products, we need to handle high transaction volumes with speed, automate complex inter-company transactions, and manage payment complexity through process automation and auditable systems of record. This tool empowers our business and finance teams as we grow,” Grab said.
The journey continues
Like many other organisations, Grab is also increasingly looking at AI to unlock more opportunities. Being among the early adopters of the technology in Southeast Asia, the company said it has deployed over 1,000 AI models across multiple touchpoints — in areas like personalisation, wait time estimation, trust, and safety.
In 2024 alone, the company listed several new AI initiatives, one of which is predicting high-demand areas with more accuracy. Through GrabRideGuide, an AI tool that predicts high-demand areas, driver-partners can optimise their routes and maximise their earnings.
Then, there’s an AI tool that simplifies menu management by allowing merchants to upload menu items using photos. Using image-to-text technology and generative AI, menu items can be identified and categorised, making it easier for merchants to update their offerings quickly and accurately.
According to Lei, Grab encourages innovation among its workforce — like last year when staff were able to experiment use cases with AI that help simplify internal processes.
“This is really to encourage and promote use cases within AI, and not just within the enterprise applications, but also the productivity systems, such as speeding up tasks like submitting leave requests or generating images for promotional events,” she said.
Moving forward, AI will continue to be an area of focus for Grab as it gears up for further expansion.
“AI is no longer a new thing, so we need to keep adopting and maximising the investment that we have put in, not just on the front-end program, but at the back end as well. On the enterprise and corporate function level, we also drive a lot of AI capabilities, and we encourage our team members to ideate what can be done faster for the company,” she concluded.
