You have probably opened a food-delivery app, ordered a ride or scrolled past a merchant promotion without thinking about who wrote the message or planned the campaign. Grab wants the people behind those services, drivers, riders and restaurant owners, to write and plan with generative AI, and it has partnered with OpenAI to teach them how.
Grab Thailand launched GO Forward with AI through its existing GrabAcademy platform. The programme covers three areas: customer communication, financial budgeting and the use of AI for business and marketing. Chantsuda Thananitayaudom, Grab Thailand Country Head, said the courses are "tailored specifically for Grab drivers and merchants" and delivered through GrabAcademy. Merchants will learn to use customer insights to create marketing campaigns. Drivers and delivery riders will explore ways to unlock supplemental income.
The training starts with in-person workshops. Participants who attend receive three months of complimentary ChatGPT Plus access. After the workshops, the materials become available as short online courses through the Grab Driver App. GrabAcademy will also offer courses on personal finance, investing, affiliate marketing and basic first aid, though those sit outside the OpenAI partnership.
The regional partnership targets more than 30,000 people across Southeast Asia. Grab has not broken down the country-by-country split, but Thailand is the first market to run in-person sessions.
Grab has been building AI assistants for its ecosystem since before the OpenAI partnership. Two products are already live in Thailand and show adoption at scale.
The GrabMerchant AI Assistant is used by more than 275,000 merchants. It analyses business data and supports planning. The tool sits inside the merchant dashboard and helps restaurant owners and other sellers make sense of sales patterns, peak hours and customer preferences.
The Driver AI Assistant, developed using OpenAI technology, has been adopted by 120,000 drivers since September. The assistant helps drivers manage schedules, find high-demand zones and respond to customer queries. Both tools run inside Grab's existing apps, so drivers and merchants do not need to switch platforms or learn new interfaces.
The training programme teaches people to use ChatGPT for tasks the assistants do not cover: writing promotional copy, drafting replies to reviews, planning social-media posts and building budgets. The idea is that the assistants handle routine data work, and ChatGPT handles the creative and planning tasks that require more context.
Grab's approach solves a problem that stalls many enterprise AI programmes: the gap between tool access and tool use. Giving someone a ChatGPT Plus subscription does not guarantee they will know what to ask it or when to trust the output. Grab pairs the subscription with structured training on specific tasks, customer communication, marketing, budgeting, that drivers and merchants already do. The training is not about AI in the abstract. It is about writing a better promotion for a lunch special or planning a week's driving schedule around school holidays.
The programme also shows how L&D can reach non-desk workers. Grab's drivers and merchants do not sit in front of a laptop all day. They work from a phone, often in short bursts between orders or rides. The training starts in person, where people can ask questions and see examples on a screen they control. Then it moves to short online courses inside the app they already use. No LMS login. No separate portal. The learning lives where the work happens.
The scale matters too. Training 30,000 people across a region requires content that works in multiple languages, for multiple roles, with varying levels of digital literacy. Grab has not published the course structure, but the partnership with OpenAI suggests the training includes prompt examples, use-case libraries and guardrails around what to automate and what to review. That kind of scaffolding is what makes AI training stick for people who do not think of themselves as technical users.
If your organisation employs people who work from a phone, who serve customers directly and who need to write, plan or budget without a support team, Grab's model is worth studying. The lesson is not that everyone needs ChatGPT Plus. The lesson is that AI training works when it starts with a real task, delivers in the place people already work and gives them time to practise before the subscription clock runs out.
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