OpenAI has hired Prabhjeet Singh, the former president of Uber India and South Asia, as its first managing director for India, escalating its push into a market the company describes as its second-largest after the United States. 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. He will own consumer growth, enterprise adoption, partnerships, regulatory engagement and operations in a country with more than 1 billion internet users.
The appointment is OpenAI's most senior India hire to date and slots into a roughly 18-month buildout. OpenAI opened its first India office in New Delhi last August and said earlier this year it would add offices in Mumbai and Bengaluru. In 2024, it hired former Truecaller and Meta executive Pragya Misra to lead public policy and partnerships, expanding her remit last year to head of strategy and global affairs. Former Twitter India head Rishi Jaitly came on earlier as a senior adviser on AI policy engagement with the Indian government.
Singh's profile fits the job description. Running Uber's India and South Asia business meant scaling a US consumer product against entrenched local competition, navigating state-by-state regulators, and managing a workforce that swings on policy decisions. Those are the same problems facing OpenAI as ChatGPT adoption surges across Indian cities and tier-two markets, and as enterprise deals start to require domestic data residency, government coordination and partner channels.
Key facts
- 01Prabhjeet Singh, former president of Uber India and South Asia, joins OpenAI in September as its first India managing director.
- 02Singh will report to Kiran Mani, OpenAI's managing director for Asia Pacific, and own consumer, enterprise, partnerships and regulatory work.
- 03OpenAI opened its first India office in New Delhi last August and plans additional offices in Mumbai and Bengaluru this year.
- 04India has more than 1 billion internet users and is OpenAI's second-largest market after the United States.
- 05Anthropic opened a Bengaluru office in late 2025 and named former Microsoft India MD Irina Ghose as its India head earlier this year.
The commercial groundwork is already in place. OpenAI has struck partnerships across higher education, enterprise payments, AI-powered commerce and web streaming, and is now part of India's expanding data center buildout. Reliance and Tata Group, the country's two largest conglomerates, are among its early partners. Hiring has scaled with the deal flow, with open roles for AI deployment engineers, developer experience engineers, a developer marketing lead, a partner director and solutions engineers.
India has emerged as the most contested non-US market for frontier AI companies, and OpenAI is not running unopposed. Anthropic opened its India office in Bengaluru in late 2025 and earlier this year named former Microsoft India managing director Irina Ghose as its India head — a near-mirror move to OpenAI's Singh hire, pulling a tenured local operator from a US tech incumbent to run the country. Microsoft itself remains entrenched through its Azure and enterprise channels, and domestic players are increasingly building on top of, or alongside, the foreign models.
The country's pull is structural. India has the world's largest developer population, generative AI demand is climbing across both consumer apps and IT services, and the government has been broadly receptive to foreign AI investment while pushing for domestic infrastructure. The result is a market where a US AI lab can plausibly build a meaningful consumer business and a meaningful enterprise business at the same time, something that is not true in most jurisdictions.
It also matters that India is price-sensitive in a way the US is not. ChatGPT's growth in the country has been driven heavily by free and low-tier users, and any serious revenue plan requires either deep enterprise contracts with the likes of Reliance and Tata or local pricing engineering on the consumer side. Singh's Uber background — a business that spent years calibrating fare structures, driver incentives and rider subsidies in India — reads as deliberate on that front.
The regulatory load is the other half of the role. India is in the middle of writing its AI policy framework, and copyright disputes, data localization rules and platform liability questions are all live. A managing director with established government relationships and a track record of operating a foreign tech platform under Indian regulators is more valuable to OpenAI in 2026 than another product or engineering hire would be.
The risks are familiar. Foreign tech executives have repeatedly underestimated how local Indian competition, pricing dynamics and political pressure can compress margins. Uber itself sold its Southeast Asia business and has spent years defending share in India against Ola and now Rapido. Whether OpenAI's API and ChatGPT revenue in India scales fast enough to justify three offices, a senior local MD and a rising headcount is an open question, and Anthropic's parallel buildout means the cost of acquiring developers and enterprise accounts is rising in real time.
Hiring Singh is a tell about how OpenAI now thinks of itself: less a research lab announcing models, more a global operating company that needs country GMs the way Uber, Google and Microsoft do. The India office is the most aggressive expression of that shift outside the US, and the next 12 months will test whether the company can convert ChatGPT's consumer momentum into the enterprise and partnership revenue that justifies treating India as a tier-one market rather than a growth story for the next earnings call.
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