How Grab put Cursor in the hands of Design, Ops, and Engineering
At Grab, Cursor became something the rest of the company could build with, not just engineering teams.
Grab serves millions of people across 8 countries in Southeast Asia through rides, deliveries, payments, and the systems behind them. About 98% of employees in Grab’s tech organization use Cursor monthly, and about 75% use it weekly.
Behind those numbers is a change in how work gets done. Designers ship production UI fixes the same day instead of waiting in an engineering queue, engineers finish in hours what used to take days, and people outside engineering, including the CEO’s Office, build their own tools.
In the early days, when we were still figuring out how to turn this new wave of AI into real changes in the way we work, Cursor was one of the tools that helped it click. It found its own product-market fit inside Grab without much of a push, pulling in non-tech teams and executives alongside Tech. Beyond adoption, it began to shift how people thought about their workflows and ways of working which was an important part of opening up our AI journey.
Designers ship the fix instead of filing a ticket
When Grab looked at more than 100,000 sanitized Cursor messages across roughly 4,000 people, bug fixing ranked in the top three activities in every professional group it studied. It accounted for about 39% of activity in both software engineering and ops-and-business roles. That tracks with how debugging works: it starts with something concrete, like an error, a failed test, a broken query, or a UI that looks wrong, so both the person and Cursor have a place to begin and a way to check the result.
For Design, that starting point turned into production work. Designers used Cursor 5.3x more than the company baseline for styling and layout. After training on Git fundamentals, designers have merged hundreds of UI fixes, each reviewed by design managers, often the same day.
I understood the potential when a UI did not look or behave as intended. Instead of raising a bug or handing over a design file, I used Cursor to follow it into the implementation and produce a working change that Engineering could validate. That was when I saw how Design could take more direct ownership of product quality.
Engineers take on work they used to skip
Among software engineers, power users sent 18x as many messages as light users, and their share of high-complexity work was 15.6% higher. The jobs themselves were familiar ones, like tests, refactors, bug fixes, and navigating unfamiliar code.
The difference showed up in what got finished. Grab has said publicly that tasks that once took days now take a few hours, and that engineers now take on refactors and tests they would have skipped under time pressure. Over a third of merge requests incorporate Cursor, and suggestion acceptance sits around 50%.
People outside engineering stop waiting in the queue
Writing code was roughly half of Cursor activity in every group. The second job changed by role: analytics leaned toward SQL and transforms (4.7x the company baseline), technical program management clustered on Git, build, and deploy (3.1x), and product managers used Cursor more for documentation. At least one PM turned PRDs into working HTML, JavaScript, and CSS demos.
In each of these roles, work moves without sitting in an engineering queue. Non-engineers in finance, operations, and regional teams are building tools for their own problems, and Grab's workshops have trained several hundred people across 5 countries, including senior leaders who built and deployed their own apps.
Cursor has been transformative for me in the CEO’s Office. As someone who isn’t a traditional technologist, I can now turn ideas into working tools, improve processes, and solve workflow challenges directly. It has changed not only my own productivity, but also what our team is capable of achieving.
The builders were already there
In roles where fewer people had opened Cursor, the people who did often used it more heavily than engineers and the company overall. Once someone found a real job for the tool, they stuck with it.
Grab treated that as enablement, not a mandate. Someone would start on a real problem they cared about, then take on the next piece of work that mattered in their day: a query for an analyst, a workflow for ops, a demo for a PM.
At Grab, we believe AI is for everyone, so we focused on upskilling everyone. Today Design, Finance, Ops, Marketing are all building and shipping on top of Tech. The builders were always here — we just handed them the keys.
What stuck at Grab is the change in the work people could suddenly finish on their own. Designers can ship a UI fix the same day, engineers take on the refactor they used to skip, and someone in the CEO’s Office can turn an idea into a working tool.
If you're interested in bringing Cursor to more teams across your organization, reach out to our team to start a Cursor trial.