Claude Just Helped Grab Save 40,000 Work Hours Each Quarter

Anthropic opened its fifth Asia Pacific office, in Singapore, on 14 October 2026, and signed a cooperation agreement with the Singapore government on AI safety and adoption. Alongside the announcement, Anthropic confirmed that Grab's AI sales assistant, built on Claude, now saves the ride hailing and delivery company roughly 40,000 work hours every quarter.

What did Anthropic announce?

The Singapore office is Anthropic's fifth in Asia Pacific, after Tokyo, Bengaluru, Seoul and Sydney. Alongside it, Anthropic signed a memorandum of understanding with Singapore's Ministry of Digital Development and Information. The agreement covers joint work on AI safety testing, incident response standards, and programs to help small and medium businesses adopt AI responsibly. It also commits Anthropic to sharing research, including data from its Anthropic Economic Index, with Singapore's policymakers as they write future AI rules.

Trust is critical for businesses, workers, and the public to use AI with confidence.from Kai Fong Chng, Permanent Secretary, Ministry of Digital Development and Information (Anthropic, 14 October 2026)

What can Claude actually do for a business right now?

• Grab's BriX sales assistant, built on Claude, saves the company about 40,000 work hours every quarter.
• More than 1,500 engineers and technical staff at GovTech Singapore, the country's digital government agency, now use Claude Code for their own development work.
• Anthropic says Singapore ranks second out of 121 countries for Claude.ai usage relative to its population, nearly six times what its size alone would predict.
• Anthropic's regional safety testing, called red teaming, was run in English, Mandarin, Malay and Tamil, so the checks match the languages businesses here actually use.

How could your business use it?

You do not need a government deal to get the same kind of result Grab did. A clinic could use Claude to draft patient follow up messages and summarise consultation notes. A retailer could use it to answer product questions on WhatsApp and write product descriptions in English, Mandarin or Malay. An accounting firm could use it to summarise client statements and flag unusual transactions before a human reviews them. The common thread in every one of Anthropic's examples, from Grab to the bank Barclays, is that Claude saves the most time when it is given one narrow, repeated task and a way to check its own work, not when it is asked to run a whole department on its own.

Also today

• Barclays is expanding its use of Claude across software development and daily banking operations, with 16,000 staff already using an internal Claude based assistant for more than one million searches, and Global Markets staff sorting about 120,000 client emails a day with it (Anthropic).
• Anthropic is adding official state level voting information and live election results inside Claude ahead of the 2026 United States midterm elections, part of a wider effort to stop the model being used to spread false voting information (Anthropic).

What should you do this week?

Anthropic's own numbers point to a simple pattern: pick one repeated task, hand it fully to Claude, and check the first batch of results yourself. Find the task in your business that eats the most hours for the least judgement, a daily email sort, a weekly report draft, a set of follow up messages, and run it through Claude for a week before deciding whether to go further. That hands on process, finding the task and setting it up properly, is exactly what we cover in Master Claude AI for Business Productivity, our workshop for business owners in Malaysia who want Claude working inside daily operations, not just as a chatbot.