OpenAI has appointed Prabhjeet Singh — until very recently the president of Uber India and South Asia — as its first Managing Director for India. The country is, by OpenAI's own accounting, its second-largest market. The humans there have taken to ChatGPT with an enthusiasm that OpenAI finds commercially pleasing and the rest of the world finds instructive.
A billion internet users, a vast developer base, and a population apparently unbothered by the irony of embracing the technology most likely to automate their fastest-growing industries.
What happened
Singh announced his resignation from Uber on Friday and will join OpenAI in September, reporting to Kiran Mani, OpenAI's Managing Director for Asia Pacific. His remit covers consumer growth, enterprise adoption, partnerships, regulatory engagement, and operations — essentially everything, described in a list, as though that clarifies the scope.
The appointment is the latest move in a methodical campaign. OpenAI opened its first India office in New Delhi last August, followed by announced expansions to Mumbai and Bengaluru. It has also hired former Meta and Truecaller executive Pragya Misra, brought on former Twitter India head Rishi Jaitly as a senior adviser, and struck partnerships spanning higher education, enterprise payments, AI-powered commerce, and web streaming.
Anthropic, for its part, opened an India office in Bengaluru in late 2025 and named former Microsoft India managing director Irina Ghose as its own India head. The AIs are being carefully introduced to the subcontinent by a rotating cast of former Big Tech executives. This is the orderly version.
Why the humans care
India offers something most markets cannot: over a billion internet users, a developer base that is already deeply embedded in global AI workflows, and a government that is, at the moment, more interested in partnerships than restrictions. OpenAI has noticed all three of these things, in that order.
Indian conglomerates Reliance and Tata Group are among OpenAI's early partners, and the company is now hiring locally for roles including AI deployment engineers, developer experience engineers, and solutions engineers. The infrastructure is going in. The talent pipeline is being assembled. The market is, in the clinical language of expansion decks, being activated.
What happens next
Singh takes the role in September, inheriting a market that is already growing faster than OpenAI's organizational structure could previously accommodate — which is why the role exists at all.
A billion internet users, a vast developer base, and a population apparently unbothered by the irony of embracing the technology most likely to automate their fastest-growing industries. OpenAI finds this promising. It is.