OpenAI has named Prabhjeet Singh as its first Managing Director for India, marking the clearest signal yet of how seriously the ChatGPT maker is treating one of its fastest-growing markets.
Singh, who steps down from his post as President of Uber India and South Asia after an 11-year run at the ride-hailing giant, will join OpenAI in September and become the company’s most senior executive in the country, reporting directly to Kiran Mani, OpenAI’s Managing Director for Asia Pacific.
His mandate is sweeping by design. Singh will own consumer growth, enterprise and developer adoption, strategic partnerships, regulatory engagement, and day-to-day operations across India, essentially building out the operational scaffolding that OpenAI has so far run from a regional hub. It’s a structural upgrade that shows how India is no longer being treated as a satellite market to be managed remotely, but as a priority worthy of dedicated, on-ground leadership.
Singh’s appointment fits a recognisable pattern of global technology and AI firms reaching for seasoned India operators rather than AI-native executives to lead their charge into the country. His résumé reads as a study in scale: an engineering degree from IIT Kharagpur, an MBA from IIM Ahmedabad, early stints at Lehman Brothers and nearly a decade at McKinsey & Company as an Associate Partner, before he joined Uber in 2015.
Over the following 11 years, the last six as president of its India and South Asia business, Singh helped widen Uber’s footprint with products like Auto, Moto, and Shuttle, pushed its electric vehicle ambitions, and folded the platform into India’s Open Network for Digital Commerce, the kind of public-private digital infrastructure play that has become a calling card of doing business in the country.
That experience transfers cleanly to the challenge ahead. India’s AI opportunity is enormous but knotty: a vast and price-sensitive consumer base, an enterprise market still working out how to deploy AI at scale, and a regulatory environment that is actively being written even as adoption accelerates. Singh has effectively run this playbook before, just with cars instead of chatbots.
The hire also lands at a moment of intensifying competition. OpenAI is jostling with Google, Microsoft, Meta, and Anthropic, all of whom are pouring resources into capturing India’s enterprise and developer ecosystem. CEO Sam Altman has previously pointed to India’s appetite for AI tools and its willingness to invest across the technology stack, from infrastructure to applications, as reasons the country sits high on OpenAI’s priority list. ChatGPT itself has become one of India’s fastest-growing consumer products, giving Singh an unusually large and engaged base to build on from day one.
For Singh personally, the move marks a complete pivot, from logistics and mobility to the frontier of generative AI. For OpenAI, it marks a shift from strategic intent to operational execution in a market it can no longer afford to run on autopilot.
