How Are Grab and Sea Group Using AI to Build Asia’s Most Powerful Super Apps?
Southeast Asia’s two largest technology companies — Grab and Sea Group — are deploying artificial intelligence across every layer of their super-app ecosystems, from ride dispatch and e-commerce personalisation to credit scoring and fraud detection. Grab reported its first full-year net profit in history in FY 2025 at USD 200 million, with revenue of USD 3.2 billion (up 19% year-on-year) and EBITDA of USD 500 million (up 60% year-on-year). Sea Group posted FY 2025 estimated revenue of USD 22.4 billion (up 32.9% year-on-year) with Q3 net income of USD 375 million (up 145% year-on-year). Both companies credit AI as a primary driver of their improving unit economics.
These are not AI companies in the way that DeepSeek or OpenAI are AI companies. They are platform businesses that have embedded AI so deeply into their operations that it has become inseparable from their competitive advantage. The distinction matters: Grab and Sea Group demonstrate that the largest commercial returns from AI in Southeast Asia may come not from building foundation models, but from applying AI to massive existing user bases.
How Does Grab Use AI Across Its Super App?
More than 90% of all Grab mobility rides are dispatched using AI, according to the company. This AI-powered dispatch system enables Grab to double its city footprint while simultaneously reducing operations headcount. The technology is particularly powerful for expansion into non-capital cities: auto-adaptive marketplace technology enables scaling to secondary and tertiary cities without proportional cost increases. Grab reports that GMV in non-capital cities is growing over 2x faster than in capital cities — a direct result of AI reducing the per-city marginal cost of operations.
Grab serves 47 million monthly transacting users across 900-plus cities in 8 countries, having crossed 20 billion cumulative rides and deliveries since its founding. CEO Anthony Tan committed to a nine-week “generative AI sprint” across the organisation in 2025, signalling that AI integration is now a top-to-bottom priority rather than a technology team initiative.
The company’s autonomous vehicle partnership with WeRide launched the first public autonomous vehicle shuttle service in Singapore, positioning Grab at the frontier of autonomous mobility in Southeast Asia. Grab’s 2028 targets include over 20% CAGR in group revenues from 2025 and USD 1.5 billion in adjusted EBITDA — a 3x increase from FY 2025 — with AI efficiency gains compounding across merchant tools, AI-driven promotions, and autonomous vehicle partnerships.
What Is Sea Group’s AI Strategy and How Does Sailor2 LLM Fit In?
Sea Group’s AI strategy centres on three interlocking advantages: a data flywheel from 400 million-plus annual active users across Shopee (e-commerce), Garena (gaming), and Monee/SeaMoney (fintech); the Sailor2 LLM, a purpose-built language model trained on 400 billion Southeast Asian language tokens across 1B, 8B, and 20B parameter variants; and Sea AI Lab (SAIL), whose “Zero Bubble Pipeline Parallelism” methodology improves AI training throughput by up to 55% over standard methods.
Shopee’s AI personalisation engine has lifted purchase conversion rates by 10% year-on-year and drove over 70% year-on-year advertising revenue growth in Q3 2025. These are not marginal improvements — a 10% lift in conversion rates across a platform processing billions of dollars in transactions translates to hundreds of millions in incremental revenue. The February 2026 Google strategic AI partnership commits Google’s engineering resources to building an agentic shopping prototype on Shopee, signalling that even the world’s largest AI companies see Shopee’s data as uniquely valuable.
SeaMoney maintains a 1.3% delinquent loan rate despite serving a largely unbanked Southeast Asian population, with its loan book reaching USD 7.9 billion (up 70% year-on-year). AI-driven credit scoring is the core technology enabling this performance: by analysing Shopee purchasing behaviour, Garena gaming patterns, and payment history, SeaMoney can assess creditworthiness for customers who have no traditional credit score. This is AI-powered financial inclusion at scale.
How Do These Super Apps Compare to Chinese AI Platforms?
Grab and Sea Group are at the beginning of the AI monetisation curve that Chinese platforms like Alibaba and ByteDance have already traversed. Alibaba’s Taobao and Tmall deployed AI-driven personalisation years ago; Ant Group’s Alipay processes billions of AI-scored financial transactions. The comparison suggests significant upside for Southeast Asian super apps as their AI capabilities mature.
The critical difference is data diversity. Chinese super apps operate primarily within China’s domestic market, while Grab and Sea Group operate across linguistically and culturally diverse markets — Indonesia, Thailand, Vietnam, the Philippines, Malaysia, Singapore, and beyond. Sea Group’s Sailor2 LLM, trained on 400 billion Southeast Asian language tokens, is a direct response to this challenge: a single model that can serve customers across multiple languages and cultural contexts.
Founder Forrest Li’s October 2025 memo outlined a vision of 10x growth to a trillion-dollar market capitalisation, explicitly powered by AI. Sea’s investment in world Labs, Fei-Fei Li’s spatial intelligence startup, signals ambition beyond e-commerce into next-generation AI applications. For Grab, the autonomous vehicle partnership with WeRide and the generative AI sprint suggest a similar trajectory of deepening AI integration.
The combined impact of these two companies on Southeast Asia’s AI landscape is structural. Together, they serve over 400 million users, operate across the region’s largest markets, and are investing billions in AI infrastructure and capabilities. As AI-native consumer platforms outside China, they represent the region’s best test case for whether super-app data advantages can compound into lasting AI competitive moats.
For more on the competitive dynamics between Southeast Asian e-commerce platforms, see our analysis of Shopee vs TikTok Shop.
Data sourced from the forthcoming Digital in Asia “AI Adoption Across Asia 2026” report.
