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Grab is a rideshare service-turned superapp, not available in the U.S. but rapidly growing in Southeast Asia. Its even outmaneuvered global players like Uber to reach a valuation north of $20 billion. Grabs cofounder and CEO Anthony Tan shares how the platform has successfully expanded into food delivery and fintech, while also investing in the future of electric vehicles and autonomous driving. For any leader looking to bolster their company culture to meet the moment, Tan shares how his team set in motion an ambitious project to study and creatively implement AIchanneling both the hunger and humility to win in a competitive and chaotic market. This is an abridged transcript of an interview from Rapid Response, hosted by the former editor-in-chief of Fast Company, Bob Safian. From the team behind the Masters of Scale podcast, Rapid Response features candid conversations with todays top business leaders navigating real-time challenges. Subscribe to Rapid Response wherever you get your podcasts to ensure you never miss an episode. Grab started in 2012 as a rideshare platform. It’s since grown into Southeast Asia’s largest super app, providing food delivery and financial services, and more. The term “super app,” is this an increasingly popular concept? What does super app mean to you? Well, the super app just means an app that has multiple services. If you look at how it’s evolved here in Southeast Asia, we started just to solve Southeast Asian problems. For example, safety. Safety was a major issue. We wanted to make sure rides were safe for women and children. That was a real problem, and we solved that. We are now at 99.9% safety. And then we said, “Okay, what’s next?” We realized, “Wait, but to get drivers, you needed to lend them a phone.” How do you lend them a phone? Because many of them didn’t even have a smartphone. So we said we’ll start a financing business. So we have fintech built into the Grab app. It was just like one service after another. And then when we [looked at] payments, we said, “Hey, the driver became an ATM, mobile ATM, and it wasn’t safe for them.” So we said, “You know what? Let’s just take cash out of the system.” The drivers have a GrabPay wallet. The customer has a GrabPay wallet. So all this just helped build more and more services on one app. I was going to ask you about the fintech stuff, because obviously you’re providing a service, but also fintech tends to have better margins than rideshare and delivery, which are tough businesses. How much of the economics was part of the decision where like, “Oh, that’s a gap that is valuable for us to fill”? The key is two things: One, how do you create amazing data? And two, how do you create an amazing collection? It’s easier to lend money out. The issue is collecting it, right, Bob? So as more and more services are rolled out, every day services are rolled out, more and more data is gathered. As more and more data is gathered, that data has given us an advantage to lend, because we basically create a credit score across hundreds of distinct data points, but it’s that massive data advantage that allows us to price risk much better and to collect much better. You mentioned that Grab operates in multiple countries. I think eight different countries, if I’ve got it right. I’m not sure how many youre up to now. That’s right. For a lot of businesses that cross borders, 2025 has been a challenging year. I mean, you alluded to it, there’s been geopolitical tensions and economic trade war sparked by the Trump administration. How does all that impact Grab? Yeah, the geopolitical environment hasn’t been easy. The tariff war hasn’t been easy. When factories have to close down because of the tariffs or whatever shocks that are happening, we are able to cushion all this additional employment. Governments really appreciate it because they’re really concerned when unemployment shoots up. So they see that we’ve been able to drive not just more employment, but within 20 minutes, they can sign up to be a delivery partner, to be a driver. But as we got more supply, actually, prices came down. So if you look at our financials, interestingly, we have more supply, which means less search sessions, which means lower prices, which means more affordability, which means more customers. Yet at the same time, our earnings per online hour keeps going up. So our drivers earn more on a per-hour basis. So really, we are seeing a win-win-win as a counter cyclical platform across all our cities in the region. I saw that last summer you implemented a company pause for a couple of months to upskill your employees on AI, something you called cyber organization. Why was this necessary at that time? What did it look like? I think mindset change is tough, especially in an org of over 9,000 people. First, we had to really upskill folks, but shock the system. So we did a generative AI sprint. I spoke to everyone, whether you’re from engineering and data science, you’re an AI specialist, or you are someone just signing up merchants in a tier-three city in Vietnam. We said, “For nine weeks, folks, we’re going to focus on learning and experimenting.” The goal outcome was, every Grabber has to be a technologist regardless of what background you come from. Before we started the sprint, something like 80% of folks were worried that their jobs would be replaced. But interestingly, by the end of it, 80% were saying they understand generative AI so much better, and they can see how it’s helping their jobs. Total mindset shift. And that’s the beauty. It wasn’t just, “Hey, we just wanted to create a sprint for fun.” We built real generative AI solutions. For example, we created AI Merchant Assistant. Now that’s deployed across millions of long-tail merchants. We worked with the top R&D labs across the world like Anthropic. Yesterday I was just looking at, we use Claude 4, to think about how to make it so much more empathetic, so much more relevant for the merchants. So now it’s helping them not just boost their sales, helping them with photo edits, helping them position how they look on GrabFood, across the customers, how to pack. They even ask questions, Bob, like, “Oh, business isn’t good. Times are tough. Can you give me some encouragement, please?” And the Merchant Assistant talks in such an empathetic, such an encouraging way, a their personal best friend. So that’s the type of product that couldn’t have come out without this generative AI sprint. You mentioned that you’re working with Anthropic and Claude, but as I remember, you also worked with OpenAI. You were their first partner in Southeast Asia. Multiple partners is good. I mean, in some ways it would be easier to lean into one system, or not necessarily? Look, you want to find the best solutions for these real-world challenges. We want to partner the best, and we want to find the best models for specific tasks. When we first started at the early days, I remember we did a change, we did an update on the app. And then there were a bunch of really angry drivers and angry customers who came up to us, scolding us. And we were wondering why. A few of them were visually impaired, and because we did an update, and they couldn’t use the accessibility option. Today we’ve been able to work with OpenAI to create, using multimodal LLMs, on voice specifically, such that they can speak so easily into it, whether you’re totally blind or not, and really solve your problem. I know you must be thinking, “Hey, look, it’s not a big set of people who are visually impaired.” But you know what, Bob? It helps these individuals in such a real large-scale way, to them individually. As we think about just the visually impaired, we’re thinking about the elderly group, the silver generation. So again, we first started with a large impact for a small group of people. Now, with specialized training, it’s going to larger and larger groups, deployed to more and more geographical markets. There are scenarios we build on our own. There are scenarios we partner with the best, like OpenAI, like Anthropic. There are scenarios where we partner with the best universities around the world, but what we do believe is, generally, partnerships make us stronger.
Category:
E-Commerce
A hearing set for Wednesday in federal court in Texas could provide families of the victims killed in two crashes of Boeing 737 Max jetliners with their final opportunity to demand that the company face criminal prosecution.U.S. District Chief Judge Reed O’Connor will hear arguments on a motion by the federal government to dismiss a felony fraud charge against Boeing in connection with the crashes that killed 346 people off the coast of Indonesia and in Ethiopia. In exchange, Boeing said it would pay or invest another $1.1 billion in fines, compensation for the crash victims’ families, and internal safety and quality measures.Prosecutors have said that Boeing deceived government regulators about a flight-control system that was later implicated in the fatal flights, which happened less than five months apart in 2018 and 2019. The hearing in Fort Worth comes more than four years after the Justice Department first announced it had charged Boeing in January 2021 and reached a $2.5 billion settlement with the aircraft maker. That deal would have protected Boeing from criminal prosecution if it strengthened its ethics and legal compliance programs, but prosecutors revived the charge last year after they said Boeing had violated the agreement.Boeing decided to plead guilty instead of going to trial, but in December 2024, O’Connor rejected that plea agreement. O’Connor, who was appointed by President George W. Bush, cited concerns he had over how diversity policies both at the federal government and at Boeing could influence the selection of an independent monitor charged with overseeing the company’s promised reforms.Lawyers representing relatives of some of the victims who want a public trial and for the company to receive more severe financial punishment welcomed the judge’s decision. But the delay worked in Boeing’s favor.The judge’s refusal to accept the agreement meant the company was free to challenge the Justice Department’s rationale for charging Boeing as a corporation. It also meant prosecutors would have to secure a new deal for a guilty plea, and they spent six months renegotiating with Boeing.During that time, President Donald Trump returned to office and ordered an end to the diversity initiatives that gave O’Connor pause.By late May, the two sides struck a new deal that took both the criminal charge and Boeing’s guilty plea off the table. The Justice Department said it offered those terms in light of “significant changes” Boeing has made to its quality control and anti-fraud programs since last summer.O’Connor has invited some of the families to speak on Wednesday. That includes relatives traveling from France, Ireland and Canada who plan to ask the judge to deny the government’s request and appoint a special prosecutor to take over the case, according to lawyers for the families.Chris and Clariss Moore of Toronto, whose 24-year-old daughter, Danielle, died when a 737 Max crashed shortly after takeoff from Ethiopia’s Addis Ababa Bole International Airport, said in a statement that the pending agreement would allow Boeing to escape justice.“The safety of passengers will be held in the balance,” the statement said.Justice Department lawyers say the families of 110 crash victims either support resolving the case before it reaches trial or do not oppose the new deal. The Justice Department has also asked the judge to leave open the possibility of refiling the conspiracy charge if the company does not hold up its end of the deal over the next two years.The department said it thought that persuading a jury to punish the company with a criminal conviction would be risky, while the new deal ensures “meaningful accountability, delivers substantial and immediate public benefits, and brings finality to a difficult and complex case whose outcome would otherwise be uncertain.”While federal judges typically defer to the discretion of prosecutors in such situations, court approval is not automatic.The yearslong case centers around a software system that Boeing developed for the Max, which began flying in 2017.In the 2018 and 2019 crashes, that software pitched the nose of the plane down repeatedly based on faulty readings from a single sensor, and pilots flying then-new planes for Lion Air and Ethiopian Airlines were unable to regain control. After the Ethiopia crash, the planes were grounded worldwide for 20 months while the company redesigned the software.Investigators found that Boeing did not inform key Federal Aviation Administration personnel about changes it had made to the software before regulators set pilot training requirements for the Max and certified the airliner for flight.Acting on the incomplete information, prosecutors said, the FAA approved minimal, computer-based training for Boeing 737 pilots, avoiding the need for flight simulators that would have made it more expensive for airlines to adopt the latest version of the jetliner.The initial 2021 settlement agreement was on the verge of expiring last year when a panel covering an unused emergency exit blew off a 737 Max during an Alaska Airlines flight over Oregon. No one was seriously injured, but it put Boeing’s safety record under renewed scrutiny. Jamie Stengle and Rio Yamat, Associated Press
Category:
E-Commerce
Consumers are more willing to accept price increases on specific products as a result of tariffsbut only within certain limits. Thats one upshot from the upcoming 2025 FutureBrand Index, which launches later this year and includes data shared exclusively with Fast Company. President Donald Trumps tariffs are starting to make a mark on businesses and consumers, with Americans facing a cumulative increase in prices that will cost the average household some $2,700 in lost income, according to the Yale Budget Lab. Some products will be worse hit than others: Clothing prices are expected to rise by 36% in the short term, while motor vehicle prices will rise some 13%, Yale predicted. And on a broad scale, experts have estimated that GDP could shrink by as much as 6% over the long-term as demand for goods and services dwindles. Yet consumers may be more tolerant of price increases in some cases than they are in others, the FutureBrand Index found. In a survey of more than 3,000 professionals, it reported that a price increase of 20% appears to be the maximum before most consumers balk and look for cheaper alternatives. !function(){"use strict";window.addEventListener("message",function(a){if(void 0!==a.data["datawrapper-height"]){var e=document.querySelectorAll("iframe");for(var t in a.data["datawrapper-height"])for(var r,i=0;r=e[i];i++)if(r.contentWindow===a.source){var d=a.data["datawrapper-height"][t]+"px";r.style.height=d}}})}(); As far as we can judge, a maximum price increase of around 20%, driven by tariffs or changes in trade rules, is often acceptable when it is clearly explained and positioned within certain key factors, according to the report. The 20% figure is a useful benchmark, but it’s crucial to recognize that, for humans, price is a feeling, said Jon Tipple, FutureBrands chief strategy officer. The perceived value, the brand’s reputation, and the public’s emotional connection all influence how that number is interpreted. This means brands can exceed that threshold if they successfully reframe the narrative and enhance the overall experience, he added. Should companies explain tariff price hikes? Probably Digging deeper, how much more people are willing to pay varies substantially across industries. For example, consumers are willing to accept a 25% increase in the cost of technology and software, but only a 20% hike in the price of food or alcohol before they consider shopping around. Most people will tolerate a 22% rise in the cost of retail products (a category the index defines as a broad range of goods,) and a 21% increase in the automotive and manufactured parts categories. Transparency and justification stand out in the index report as key to how consumers and businesses react to cost increases. If companies can justify hiking their prices, for example by making clear they are out of the companys control as in the case of tariffs, consumers tend to be more understanding. That finding jibes with recent polling from Pew Research that found some 61% of respondents disapprove of the Trump administrations tariffsa sign that Americans do, by and large, understand that price increases are tied to external business factors. In other words, consumers dont feel like businesses are simply trying to squeeze them purely for profit. Critically, the index found that value preservation is essential; people are more willing to pay higher prices if quality, reliability, and service levels remain intact despite the trade-related challenges. What this seems to suggest is that tariff-induced price increases are somewhat psychological. If businesses can successfully tie a cost hike to higher duties or other things beyond their control, then at least some customers will take it in stride.
Category:
E-Commerce
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