OpenAI Appoints Former Uber India Chief Prabhjeet Singh as Managing Director for India OpenAI’s latest move in India underscores how fiercely global AI companies are competing for the country’s fast‑growing market and regulatory goodwill.

In August 2024, OpenAI opened its first office in New Delhi as part of a broader push to anchor its physical presence in India. Earlier this year, the company said it would add offices in Mumbai and Bengaluru, aligning its footprint with India’s major tech and financial hubs. Over the past months, it has also announced partnerships spanning higher education, enterprise payments, AI‑powered commerce, web streaming, and data‑center capacity, including deals with conglomerates Reliance and Tata Group.

Alongside bricks‑and‑mortar expansion, OpenAI has steadily built a local leadership bench. In 2024, it hired former Truecaller and Meta executive Pragya Misra to lead public policy and partnerships, later expanding her role to head of strategy and global affairs. It also brought in former Twitter India head Rishi Jaitly as a senior adviser on AI policy engagement with the Indian government. In March, former JioStar CEO and longtime Google executive Kiran Mani was appointed managing director for Asia Pacific, setting up a regional reporting line for future country heads.

On June 26–27, 2026, this strategy culminated in the appointment of Prabhjeet Singh, outgoing president of Uber India and South Asia, as OpenAI’s first managing director for India. Singh, an IIT Kharagpur and IIM Ahmedabad alumnus and ex‑McKinsey associate partner, will join in September and report to Mani. He will oversee consumer growth, enterprise adoption, partnerships, regulatory engagement, and operations in what OpenAI has called its second‑largest market after the United States.

From the company’s perspective, the hire is a bet on scale: India already has about 100 million weekly active ChatGPT users, with 18‑ to 24‑year‑olds sending nearly half of all messages from the country. For rivals, it signals intensifying competition: Anthropic opened a Bengaluru office in late 2025 and recently tapped former Microsoft India managing director Irina Ghose to lead its India push, as U.S. and domestic AI firms race to capture a market of more than a billion internet users and a vast developer base.

Continue reading https://foxvector.com/stories/019f0b67-0de8-386e-7145-3a709df7b2b9