Southeast Asian tech major Grab has announced its collaboration with Microsoft-backed artificial intelligence (AI) company OpenAI to embed advanced AI solutions into its platform in the region.
The collaboration, which is the first of its kind for OpenAI in Southeast Asia, will integrate ChatGPT Enterprise, a variant of the ChatGPT model, in a pilot project aimed at Grab employees.
According to the announcement, Grab will access OpenAI’s expertise to make its services more accessible to users, especially the visually impaired or elderly.
The collaboration will also see Grab using AI technology to build customer support chatbots and enhance its map-making efforts through greater automation and higher-quality data extraction from visual images.
This means GrabMaps can be updated even faster, delivering a better experience to consumers and driver-partners, per the announcement.
Philipp Kandal, chief product officer at Grab, said the company believes that generative AI has a lot of potential to further transform the way it solves problems for partners and users.
“Our goal with any new technology has always been to use it to solve real problems, at scale,” said Philipp Kandal, chief product officer at Grab.
Grab, which has trimmed its workforce and cut back on incentives and other costs in recent years, booked its first quarterly profit in Oct-Dec 2023.
Singapore-based Grab booked a profit of $11 million for the fourth quarter (Q4) of 2023, a turnaround from the $391 million net loss reported a year ago.
OpenAI, on the other hand, was founded in 2015. Its investors include Microsoft, which is its largest; Khosla Ventures; Thrive Capital; Andreessen Horowitz; and Sequoia Capital.
The company launched ChatGPT in late 2022 which put the spotlight on generative AI technologies.