OpenAI hires Uber India veteran as first India managing director

OpenAI has appointed Prabhjeet Singh, the former president of Uber India and South Asia, as its first managing director for India, signaling a major escalation in its commitment to the country. Singh will join in September and report to Kiran Mani, OpenAI's managing director for Asia Pacific. His remit covers consumer growth, enterprise adoption, partnerships, regulatory engagement, and operations in what OpenAI has described as its second-largest market after the United States.

Singh spent nearly 11 years at Uber, joining in 2015 as head of strategy and becoming president in 2020. Before Uber, he was an associate partner at McKinsey. He holds degrees from IIT Kharagpur and IIM Ahmedabad. His appointment follows a series of investments by OpenAI in India, including opening a Delhi office last August and announcing plans for offices in Mumbai and Bengaluru. The company also hired former Meta and Truecaller executive Pragya Misra to lead public policy and partnerships, and former Twitter India head Rishi Jaitly as a senior advisor on government AI policy.

India is a critical market for OpenAI. CEO Sam Altman has said the country has 100 million weekly active ChatGPT users, and that users aged 18-24 account for nearly half of all messages sent from India. The company has struck partnerships with Pine Labs for enterprise payments, Reliance JioHotStar for streaming, and Tata Group for data center capacity.

For AI builders and founders, this move signals that OpenAI is treating India as a distinct operating theater requiring dedicated local leadership. The hire comes amid intensifying competition: Anthropic opened a Bengaluru office in late 2025 and named former Microsoft India head Irina Ghose as its country lead. Google and domestic players like Sarvam AI (which raised $234 million last month) are also competing for India's developer and enterprise market. There is also a geopolitical dimension: the U.S. government's June 2026 order suspending Anthropic's most powerful models for non-US users sparked a sovereignty debate in India, with proposals for a $5 billion domestic AI fund. By placing a seasoned local operator in charge, OpenAI is signaling it takes those political risks seriously.

Singh's mandate is both commercial and political. He will oversee OpenAI's go-to-market strategy, enterprise partnerships, and policy engagement with the Indian government, which has embraced AI as a national priority. The company is also actively hiring for roles including AI deployment engineers, developer marketing leads, and solutions engineers in India. The appointment underscores that OpenAI views India not just as a user base but as a strategic market requiring dedicated leadership and localized operations.