Prabhjeet Singh, who previously led Uber's operations across India, is now in charge of OpenAI's business in that country. OpenAI announced the appointment on Friday, June 26, 2026, according to Reuters.

Singh has spent years learning how to run a technology business in India — a country where millions of people use smartphones and digital services, but where rules and costs work very differently than in the U.S. At Uber, he dealt with strict government regulations, intense local competition, and price-conscious customers. Those skills are directly useful as OpenAI enters and grows in India.

OpenAI, which is best known for creating ChatGPT, just raised $122 billion in funding back in March 2026. The company plans to use that money on new AI research, computing power, and expansion into new countries. India matters a lot in that plan. The country has an enormous pool of software engineers and growing demand from businesses that want to use AI tools.

OpenAI's products have expanded well beyond ChatGPT. In October 2025, the company launched AgentKit, which is a set of tools that help developers and businesses build and operate AI agents — software that can make decisions and take actions on its own. A month earlier, OpenAI introduced a shopping feature inside ChatGPT that lets AI handle purchases. Both products need skilled people in each country to explain them to customers and work out how they fit with local systems.

Singh brings a bonus advantage: when he was at Uber, that company was already using OpenAI's technology. Uber built an AI assistant powered by OpenAI to help its drivers switch to electric vehicles. This means Singh already knows firsthand what OpenAI's products can do. He comes in with practical experience, not just a briefing book.

The financial picture also matters here. OpenAI reported that it lost money last quarter — it spent $3.7 billion while bringing in $5.7 billion in revenue, according to Reuters reporting. That gap between spending and income creates pressure to earn more money from new places, especially fast-growing ones like India. The Indian government has been pushing AI as a national priority, and businesses in the country are spending more on AI systems.

The choice to hire someone like Singh — a senior executive with a proven track record of scaling a global company in a specific country — signals that OpenAI wants to win big contracts, not just get noticed by individual developers. It is a serious bet on India.

Whether Singh can actually turn that opportunity into real business growth is an open question. Indian companies take a long time to make purchase decisions, the buying process is complicated, and local companies are beginning to build their own AI alternatives. Still, the hire makes clear where OpenAI thinks its next growth will come from as it works to pay down its costs and live up to what all that funding implies.