Just this morning, Anthony Tan, the co-founder and CEO of homegrown e-hailing platform Grab, shared a short video of himself on LinkedIn. In it, he’s speaking in Bahasa Indonesia and sharing one of his latest projects.
Except it’s not actually him. He looks and sounds just like him, but is in fact an artificial intelligence (AI) avatar of the CEO.
And his name is AI-thony.
Sharing candidly online, Anthony explained that AI-thony is his personal experiment in the realm of prompt engineering. “My goal was to communicate with Grabbers (Grab workers) globally in their native languages, but I can’t speak them all.”
At the moment, Grab’s services are available in eight countries across the Southeast Asian region—Singapore, Malaysia, Cambodia, Indonesia, Myanmar, Philippines, Thailand, and Vietnam.
While a good number of residents in these countries can converse well in English, many more still prefer their country’s national language. You can typically hear Filipinos speaking Tagalog, Cambodians speaking Khmer, and Burmese speaking Burmese.
So that’s where AI-thony comes in.
To create AI-thony, Anthony uploaded a video of him speaking in English, input his script, and gave his consent for the avatar to be created. He said each video takes about 15 minutes to be generated, and the result is like the video he shared.
The technology is still not fully perfected yet, but he happily announced that they’ve successfully created such videos in eight languages, one for each of the aforementioned countries.
“AI is not going to replace humans, but humans with AI are going to replace humans without AI,” the CEO’s avatar stated. Seeing as how AI is becoming more mainstream these days, it’s clear that Grab is hopping onto this development so they’re not left behind.
In that spirit, Grab has been organising weekly learning workshops and fireside chats with industry leaders for its team of Grabbers to grow as technologists.
“This is our investment into your personal growth. I hope my experiment shows how even a simple use case can make us more efficient and customer-focused. Imagine if all Grabbers applied this to their projects, think of how much more impact we can make for our ecosystem and community!”
Embracing current technological trends
Based on the comments on his post, it seems that people are excited to see how this digital transformation will turn out.
Some of them even praised the Bahasa Indonesia spoken in the video as the accent sounds “sangat bagus (very good)” and “legit”.
Aside from being used by Grab’s employees, this could help in communicating with passengers who aren’t native to the region. Other corporations might also find this AI assistance beneficial in liaising with overseas clients.
The introduction of this AI-thony experiment comes not long after Grab announced the “first-of-its-kind” collaboration in Southeast Asia with OpenAI.
Back in late May, the two companies declared their collaboration to build and deploy advanced solutions that enrich the Grab experience for users, partners, and employees. This included:
- making use of text and voice capabilities to make Grab’s services more available to users, like the visually impaired and the elderly
- AI chatbots for better and faster customer support
- improving Grab’s mapmaking efforts through greater automation and higher quality data extraction
Hence, this is possibly another one of Grab’s ventures into AI. Whether or not this is done in partnership with OpenAI is not clear as Anthony made no mention of it in his LinkedIn post.
No doubt Grab’s use of AI may be polarising to some, but it’s difficult to overlook the benefits AI poses when it comes to getting tasks done efficiently (albeit accuracy could be debated). It’s appealing to businesses who want to better streamline their processes.
In this case, which side are you on?
Featured Image Credit: Anthony Tan via LinkedIn
