Based in Malaysia. Open to roles globally.

Work Smart City Expo Kuala Lumpur

Showing Malaysiathat Grab is atech company first.

  • Event strategy
  • Event design
  • Product marketing

Smart City Expo started in Barcelona. In September 2025 it held its first regional edition in Kuala Lumpur: three days at KLCC with 21,800+ attendees from 64 countries, 146 speakers and 126 exhibitors, under the theme “AI Cities: Shaping Our Digital Future”.

Maps sit underneath everything Grab does, from transport to the economic opportunities it creates for Malaysians through tech. GrabMaps was Grab’s spotlight, and the goal was to move how people see Grab: from food delivery and ride-hailing to a tech company first.

Event name
Smart City Expo Kuala Lumpur 2025 · 17–19 September, KLCC
About
The inaugural regional edition of Smart City Expo World Congress, organised by the Digital Ministry through MDEC and DNB. Exhibitions, forums and the AI Cities Pitch Lab, with 10,700+ participants.
My role
Project Owner, Event Strategy & Design, Product Marketing
The audience
Government (22+ mayors, the Digital Ministry, MDEC, DBKL), enterprise (Dell, Intel, Huawei, Ericsson, Tesla and PropTech), investors and VCs, startups and academics
Visited by
Prime Minister of Malaysia Anwar Ibrahim and Digital Minister Gobind Singh Deo

The stakes

Most people know Grab for rides and food. With the Prime Minister walking the floor, we had a few minutes to show the maps underneath it all.

Why it mattered

Grab has deep ties with Malaysian transport and digital government. This was a collaboration between GrabMaps and Grab Malaysia’s Public Affairs and Marketing teams, and a high-stakes room: VIPs, government agencies, potential clients and partners, all in one hall.

What I led

  • Event strategy
  • Product marketing
  • Brand positioning
  • Demand generation
  • Spatial design

From sketch to brief

Taking ownership of creative direction as the brand guardian

To give the event production agency a clear starting point, I sketched the layout, mapped the visitor journey and set the look from GrabMaps’ brand guidelines, identity and imagery library. Those sketches became the brief we built on together.

A slide from the brief: the hardware zone centrepiece, with a sketch beside written notes

pages from the brief to the agencies

Brief slide on flooring: road-like paths with references
Flooring that reads like a road
Brief slide on the city line: a skyline wall with references
A city skyline along the wall
Brief slide on floor strips guiding visitors through the zones
Floor strips that guide the way
Brief slide on the centrepiece with plant and rock references
The centrepiece, with plant references

The centrepiece

A Grab bike on a rock, in a conference hall

How do you make something technical approachable? Put the most familiar thing centre stage: a Grab bike. Mapping by bike is what sets GrabMaps apart, so we built an unconventional booth around it: a huge rock wrapped in tropical plants, with the bike on top, visible from near and far.

  1. A Grab mapper on a scooter with KartaCam on her helmet, under a canopy of trees

    Step 1

    Start with a familiar scene

    A Grab bike on Southeast Asia’s roads, from the KartaCam shoot.

  2. Concept slide: the bike sitting on greenery, surrounded by a hardware display, with sketches and references

    Step 2

    Design the concept around it

    The bike on a bed of common tropical plants, ringed by the hardware display, info cards and QR codes.

  3. The finished booth: a Grab bike on a mossy rock under a glowing GrabMaps sign reading The Map That Moves Southeast Asia

    Step 3

    Make it a centerpiece

    A real Grab bike on a large rock, surrounded by tropical plants, in the middle of the expo.

The visitor journey

Splitting the space into three zones

The highlight was a live product demo of imagery search on an internal tool, alongside the ways Grab makes its maps. We planned the space so every kind of visitor had a place, without anyone blocking the flow of the hall.

  1. An information wall on how GrabMaps is made, with screens and printed panels

    Zone 1

    Read at your own pace

    A welcoming wall of information for visitors who prefer to explore on their own.

  2. The centrepiece: a green Grab bike with KartaCam on a mossy rock, ringed by a map-printed counter

    Zone 2

    Room to talk

    A networking table around the centrepiece, out of the way of the traffic flow.

  3. Visitors gathered at the screen wall reading Now Empowering Businesses

    Zone 3

    Listen to a demo

    A spot to gather for the sales team’s live product demos.

Messaging & leads

Messaging & Demand Gen

I wrote the messaging for two audiences at once: B2B enterprise and government partners. Every wall had to answer why their business, or their city, should care.

With the attendee and VIP lists from Public Affairs and the organisers, our sales and partnerships teams could book meetings ahead. For colleagues who couldn’t attend, we set up ways to drive and document leads: QR codes to our website and to our API services through AWS.

Planning slide on messaging for a mixed B2B and government crowd
Planning slide on capturing leads with QR codes

Photos of the eventSmart City Expo Kuala Lumpur, 2025

Two team members on each side of the booth under the GrabMaps sign
The booth’s GrabMaps sign above the bike centrepiece
A visitor exploring the hardware display
An interactive poll wall asking visitors what bothers them most on the road
The hardware wall with KartaCam devices on plinths below a screen
Close-up of the map-printed counter around the centrepiece
The GrabMaps booth in the expo hall
A hand holding a phone showing the GrabMaps app
A glowing map pin sign at the booth

Output

From a sketchbook to the Prime Minister’s walk-through

With Public Affairs, we prepared the story for the Prime Minister’s and the Minister of Digital’s visit, so the booth did its job in a few focused minutes. It set up the conversation between Grab’s Head of AI and the Malaysian government’s Ministry of Digital.

More work