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OpenAI names Uber India president Prabhjeet Singh as its first country managing director

· by Pondero Newsdesk

The short version

OpenAI appointed Prabhjeet Singh, who led Uber India and South Asia for six years, as its first managing director for India. Singh joins in September and reports to Asia Pacific MD Kiran Mani.

OpenAI names Uber India president Prabhjeet Singh as its first country managing director

India now has more than 100 million weekly ChatGPT users. That figure, cited by OpenAI in announcing the hire, explains why the company went looking for a country-level managing director rather than promoting from its existing India team.

What happened

OpenAI appointed Prabhjeet Singh as managing director for India on June 26, 2026. Singh spent nearly 11 years at Uber, six of those as president of Uber India and South Asia. He announced his Uber resignation the same day. He will join OpenAI in September and report to Kiran Mani, the company's Asia Pacific managing director, per TechCrunch.

Singh's brief covers consumer growth, enterprise adoption, partnerships, regulatory engagement, and operations across India. The appointment makes him OpenAI's most senior executive in the country and its first country-level MD appointment in Asia.

The hire fits a pattern of rapid India expansion. OpenAI opened its first India office in New Delhi in August 2025, then announced Mumbai and Bengaluru offices earlier this year. The company has since struck partnerships with Reliance (Jio AI search), Tata (100 MW data center capacity), Pine Labs (enterprise payments), and a consortium of universities pushing AI skills training, per TechCrunch's running coverage of those deals.

Why it matters

The 100-million-user figure, per OpenAI's own claim, makes India the largest ChatGPT market outside the United States. An MD hire of this seniority signals OpenAI is treating India as a strategic priority, not a growth experiment.

For enterprise operators in India, a dedicated country head with a mandate that explicitly includes enterprise adoption means a more direct channel for procurement, customization, and compliance conversations. Singh's Uber background is significant here. He built Uber's India business from a handful of cities into a national operation, which required navigating regulatory friction across multiple state governments. That same skill set applies to enterprise AI sales in a market where data localization rules and sector-specific AI regulations are actively in flux.

Rival Anthropic moved first on a comparable structure. It opened an India office in Bengaluru in late 2025 and named former Microsoft India managing director Irina Ghose as its India head in January 2026. OpenAI's counter is a leader with operational rather than policy-focused credentials, which fits the consumer-scale and enterprise-revenue focus Singh's brief describes.

Context

Singh joins a team that already has some India-specific leadership. Pragya Misra, formerly of Truecaller and Meta, joined OpenAI to lead public policy before her role expanded to head of strategy and global affairs. Rishi Jaitly, former Twitter India head, came on earlier as a senior adviser for government AI policy engagement. Singh sits above those functions as the country's first managing director.

The broader AI company calculus in India involves three overlapping pressures: a developer population that ranks among the world's largest, government interest in building sovereign AI capacity, and conglomerate partners (Tata, Reliance, Infosys) large enough to deploy AI at national scale. The Anthropic-versus-OpenAI contest for India will play out partly through which company secures the deeper partnership with those conglomerates and partly through which one gets a favorable position in any emerging regulatory framework.

What to watch next

Singh's enterprise mandate will show results most clearly if OpenAI secures a dedicated India API region, which would address latency and data residency concerns for large enterprise clients. Watch also for whether any of the existing Tata, Reliance, or Infosys partnerships deepen into long-term procurement contracts after Singh starts in September.

Sources