Since our inception in 2012, Grab’s mission has been to drive Southeast Asia forward by creating economic empowerment for everyone. We believe that the use of AI technologies can help us make rapid progress on our mission and solve Southeast Asia’s most complex problems. Grab uses AI to build a safe and trusted digital platform, solve real-world problems, and empower Southeast Asia’s micro-entrepreneurs to grow and thrive. We also recognise that AI needs to be developed and deployed responsibly to mitigate risk and potential for harm. Our AI ethics principles guide our efforts to this end. We will continue to deliberate on and evolve these principles to keep pace with the rapid developments in AI technologies, their impact, and associated tradeoffs.
1. Promote benefits to society: As we design AI-based solutions for our users, we aim to take into account the social and economic needs of individual users as well as society at large with the goal of ensuring that the final product is beneficial to all. Grab’s values of heart, hunger, honour, and humility are used as guiding principles in the system design process with the goal of ensuring that each stakeholder’s needs are taken into consideration.
2. Fairness and Inclusion: We work hard to ensure that outcomes generated by AI systems are fair and promote inclusion. While different people may understand fairness differently, we strive to ensure that AI-generated outcomes do not disadvantage or harm any stakeholder groups. However, because our ecosystem is composed of various stakeholders such as driver and merchant partners, consumers and the platform, at times we may require balancing individual tradeoffs with the goal to improve the overall efficiency and performance of the ecosystem. Grab will also continue to seek to understand the social, cultural, and other context-specific nuances in Southeast Asian markets in order to create hyper local solutions that limit any unintended discriminatory impact. We will continue to experiment with technical and non-technical solutions to mitigate the risk of bias in AI models and datasets.
3. Transparency: We believe that it is important for our users to understand the process through which the decisions that impact their day to day lives are made. We will strive to provide better clarity on how our algorithms work and the factors that inform them. This transparency will also help us mitigate unfairness concerns in AI outcomes, build customer and partner trust, and continually enhance the design and performance of our AI systems based on feedback from consumers.
4. Safety and reliability: It is of utmost importance to us that our AI systems function safely, reliably, and adhere to the highest performance standards to minimise any unintended outcomes. We will continue to use AI and enhance its performance to develop more rigorous safety practices for our driver-partners, merchant-partners, and consumers, including use cases like fraud detection.
5. Human-centricity: We aim to continually understand and accommodate the evolving needs of our consumers, driver-partners, and merchant-partners in the design and deployment of AI systems. The context in which users experience these systems and the feedback they provide ultimately govern how we design and improve AI systems to provide the most optimal user experience.
6. Accountability: We employ a detailed system of checks and balances to ensure that AI systems are functioning reliably and outcomes are consistent with the intention, design ideas, and values behind them. We will also seek to provide adequate opportunity for human intervention and control where necessary. To enable user access to quick and efficient complaint redressal, we have put appropriate appeals and feedback mechanisms in place and will continue to improve them as needed.
7. Privacy and Security: We will continue to incorporate appropriate privacy and data security features in the development and use of AI systems. This process will not only involve adherence to how Grab commits to process users’ personal data (see Privacy Notice) and applicable data protection laws, but also include improvements in our security features to ensure that our systems, including those driven by AI, operate in a secure environment to safeguard entrusted data and company assets.
