Grab Empowers Southeast Asian Merchants with AI-Driven Business Advisory Using Claude

Grab operates Southeast Asia's leading super-app, serving over 44 million monthly transacting users across mobility, deliveries, and financial services. The company supports a diverse merchant network ranging from small entrepreneurs to large retail chains across multiple countries. Grab faced a critical challenge: providing consistent, high-quality business support to millions of merchants with vastly different needs and scales, while maintaining the personalized guidance that drives merchant success. Traditional support models could not efficiently serve this diverse base while preserving quality at scale. To address this, Grab deployed a Claude-powered Merchant AI Assistant, enabling merchants to access enterprise-level business recommendations around the clock, regardless of business size or local market.

Grab selected Claude after rigorous evaluation of multiple AI models, testing technical capabilities and real-world business impact on merchant engagement and retention. Claude's superior performance on merchant interactions, combined with its ability to maintain authentic and empathetic communication across diverse users, proved decisive. The Claude-powered Merchant AI Assistant operates as a 24/7 digital business advisor across Grab's 8 regional markets, delivering personalized recommendations in multiple regional languages. The Assistant provides practical guidance such as detecting missing menu photos and advising step-by-step improvements, strategic recommendations including new menu items based on local trends, marketing insights on promotional campaigns, business analysis to identify growth opportunities, and operational support navigating the GrabMerchant platform. By understanding each merchant's unique context and goals, the Assistant transforms from a basic help desk into a true strategic business partner.

The Merchant AI Assistant has generated measurable impact across Grab's merchant ecosystem. When merchants implement the Assistant's recommendations—such as adding menu photos, launching targeted promotions, or optimizing listings—they create a ripple effect: better-performing merchants lead to improved platform quality, increased consumer satisfaction, and strengthened ecosystem growth. The Assistant's multilingual deployment ensures consistent advice quality across diverse markets, from small vendors in Bangkok to large restaurant chains in Jakarta. Grab views Claude as the long-term foundation for merchant support and plans to expand the Assistant's capabilities through standardized infrastructure enabling multiple engineering teams to innovate efficiently. The deployment reflects Grab's mission to democratize economic opportunity, ensuring small and medium-sized businesses and entrepreneurs across Southeast Asia access the same quality recommendations and insights available to large enterprises.