JAKARTA, April 8 — South-east Asia’s top ride-hailing and delivery firm, Grab, is planning to introduce “Carri”, a physical automation robot, to bridge the gap between digital intelligence and real-world logistics.

Its group chief executive officer and co-founder, Anthony Tan, described Carri not as a replacement, but as a superhuman extension for Grab’s delivery partners.

“Our drivers lose around 10 per cent of their earning time looking for a restaurant in a big mall or waiting for their customers to come downstairs from large office towers. 

“If this little fella can handle that weight by finding the restaurant and then passing the order to the driver, it allows our drivers to move to the next job much more quickly. This is the next step of how we will help our partners not just survive the shifts in this world, but to thrive in it,” he said at the company’s annual product event, GrabX 2026, here today.

Besides robots, Tan said Grab is also planning to take the intelligence layer and put it into physical hardware to create autonomous vehicles and closed-circuit television cameras.

The move could reaffirm its commitment to being an artificial intelligence (AI)-first, heart-led platform, ensuring AI benefits everyone, including underserved communities across South-east Asia, he said.

“We are taking our intelligence layer out of the cloud and onto the street. By embodying our intelligence layer, we open up avenues for helping our partners solve problems in completely novel ways through physical automation,” said Tan. 

At GrabX last year, Grab introduced “MAI”, its merchant AI assistant, and extended its AI effort to introduce a driver AI assistant, “Coach”.

“Just like MAI, Coach was born out of our ‘AI-First with Heart’ philosophy, where we take the most sophisticated technology and put it into the hands of real people, to solve real problems for them,” he said.

Grab worked with OpenAI on Coach, and over 500,000 drivers today have that partner in their pocket. 

“We are going to roll this out to millions more,” he said. — Bernama