Grab CTO Suthen Paradatheth on how using his competitors’ robots ‘keeps us on our toes’

On May 20, Grab announced that one of its robots, named Carri, will start deliveries in Singapore’s Punggol district, the city-state’s hub for testing robotic services. 

But Carri has already been plying the corridors of Grab’s Singapore headquarters, says chief technology officer Suthen Paradatheth. And Carri’s not alone. “We don’t oblige our business units to just use our robots,” Paradatheth told Fortune during an interview on the sidelines of the Asia Tech (ATx) summit. “If you go to the Grab office now, you’ll see robots from other companies as well. We use a 1+n strategy which keeps us on our toes.”

Paradatheth has been involved with Grab from almost the very beginning, before the company even got its name. He joined the firm, then a Malaysia-based ride-hailing outfit called MyTeksi, as a part-time consultant after a mutual friend introduced him to its founders, Anthony Tan and Tan Hooi Ling. 

“Our mission was to make taxis safer in Kuala Lumpur,” Paradatheth explained. “Ling told me a story of starting a call with her mom whenever she rode home at night; even if they didn’t speak, it was a way to make sure the driver knew she was being monitored by someone.” The anecdote hit home for Paradatheth, whose own sister had similarly recounted feeling unsafe while riding taxis. “I saw a very real problem to get involved in,” he said.

Paradatheth joined full-time in 2015 and followed the company to Singapore, where it rebranded to Grab. He then moved through roles including chief of staff and head of engineering for research and development, before being appointed as CTO in 2022.

“A lot of folks have grown with the company, just like me,” he said. “Many of the senior leaders in the company are people who were with me during the 2012 storeroom days; they came as interns and are now heads of engineering.”

Building a Southeast Asian tech empire

Grab, No. 128 on Fortune’s Southeast Asia 500 list, reported $2.8 billion in revenue last year, up from just $469 million in 2020. 

Paradatheth credits the global rise of smartphone ownership for Grab’s growth, but he remembers a time when the device wasn’t quite so ubiquitous. “Back in 2012, smartphones were still a thing that only early adopters were buying.”

Grab decided to give its drivers a basic smartphone, a Samsung Galaxy Y, so they could access the app. Drivers could pay for the phone via installments or through a cut of their earnings. 

“In Southeast Asia, we’re working under pretty tight economic constraints, with most markets being emerging markets,” Paradatheth said. “And so engineering for that—both in terms of optimizing for what the customer has and what they can use, and making sure we’re constantly able to drive down costs—have been things we’ve invested in from those early days.”

Grab’s app has expanded far beyond ride-hailing to include digital payments, insurance, and delivery. It also developed its own mapping service, GrabMaps, weaning itself off third-party mapping solutions like Google Maps. 

“We found that third-party mapping providers just didn’t have the coverage we wanted,” Paradatheth explained. “For example, the small side roads which our two-wheel riders on motorcycle taxis use weren’t really captured in third-party maps.”

‘AI first, with heart’

Grab has embedded over 1,000 AI models into its platforms, and leaders claim they’re guided by the principle “AI first, with heart.”

“It’s about harnessing the AI inflection to create customer value,” Paradatheth says.

He points to Grab’s AI-powered translation model, which it built to provide in-app translation for Southeast Asia’s languages, as an example of the firm’s attempts at harnessing the technology. He said the tool is 90% accurate, and can even capture informal contractions and “SMS speak”. (The firm now operates in eight markets across Southeast Asia and entered Taiwan in March, after paying $600 million to acquire Foodpanda’s local business.)

“Southeast Asia, in particular, has layers of locality,” he said. “There are thousands of languages, but also lots of tourists from China, Japan and South Korea who come to visit, and often, English isn’t their primary language.” 

Grab is also working to strengthen AI literacy and adoption in the markets it operates in. The platform will launch a program for small- and medium-sized enterprises in its home market of Singapore, hoping to encourage AI adoption across 10,000 food and beverage, e-commerce, and retail firms.

Still, Grab’s push towards AI is worrying some who rely on the platform for their income. The platform is making a big push towards automated driving, investing in several self-driving vehicle startups and launching a robobus in Singapore.

“We are living in a world where humans who don’t embrace AI will very likely be displaced. This is not a dystopian future, folks, it is a reality we must confront today,” said Grab CEO Anthony Tan during the firm’s flagship event in Jakarta in April.

Paradatheth swears that humans will remain at the heart of all Grab’s operations. “We don’t see our autonomous vehicles or delivery robots as substitutes for people,” he said. “We see them as complementary to what our driver partners already do.”

Looking forward, he wants Grab to become a global leader in urban embodied AI. “There’s an opportunity to provide all kinds of optimization—to make journeys smoother, and living in cities more enjoyable and fun.”