Days after introducing a ChatGPT plan specifically designed for Indian consumers, OpenAI has revealed plans to create its first office in India in an attempt to capitalize on the nation’s quickly expanding AI market.
In the upcoming months, the company plans to establish a local team in India and construct a corporate office in the nation’s capital, New Delhi, it announced on Friday. This action expands on OpenAI’s recent regional hiring initiatives. Pragya Misra, a former Truecaller and Meta executive, was named the company’s public policy and partnerships lead in India in April 2024. In order to help smooth talks with the Indian government on AI policy, OpenAI also hired Rishi Jaitly, the former head of Twitter India, as a senior advisor.
India, the second-largest internet and smartphone market in the world after China, is a perfect fit for OpenAI, which is vying for users with the help of tech behemoths like Google and Meta as well as AI startups like Perplexity.
In order to “focus on strengthening relationships with local partners, governments, businesses, developers, and academic institutions,” the company announced that it has begun employing a local staff. In order to tailor its goods to the local market and even develop features and tools especially for India, it intends to gather input from Indian users.
Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI, said in a statement:
“Opening our first office and building a local team is an important first step in our commitment to make advanced AI more accessible across the country and to build AI for India, and with India”.
Additionally, OpenAI declared that it would have its first Developer Day in India later this year in addition to its first Education Summit this month.
Without any doubt, India is an important customer market for OpenAI, however the company continues to encounter additional difficulties, which includes finding out exactly how to turn free users into subscribers. It has to get past the marketing challenges in a price-sensitive South Asian market, similar to other major AI competitors.
ChatGPT Go was announced by the company, a sub-$5 plan, earlier this week. It charges ₹399 (about $4.75) a month, making it the first ChatGPT plan in India that is accessible to a wide customer audience. This transpired only a few days after Perplexity, an arch-rival, partnered up with Bharti Airtel, the biggest Indian telecommunication supplier, to provide Perplexity Pro to Airtel’s more than 360 million clients for an extended period of 12 months.
Integrating with Indian companies presents additional difficulties for OpenAI. Asian News International (ANI), an Indian news agency, filed a lawsuit against OpenAI in November for allegedly utilizing its copyrighted news information without authorization. In January, a number of Indian publishers joined the case.
Even so, OpenAI is looking to capitalize on the Indian government’s proactive promotion of Artificial Intelligence across all of its departments and attempts to boost the position of India on the global AI map.
Altman said:
“India has all the ingredients to become a global AI leader — amazing tech talent, a world-class developer ecosystem, and strong government support through the IndiaAI Mission.”
OpenAI did not open its first office in Asia in India. In the past, the business has established offices in South Korea, Japan, and Singapore. Anthropic, an OpenAI competitor, recently opened an office in Tokyo rather than New Delhi because it viewed Japan as a higher-priority market on the continent than India.
A Silicon Valley-based investor source recently told TechCrunch that the challenge of acquiring enterprise clients is one of the reasons many AI companies do not prioritize India as an early market.
In a prepared statement, Indian IT Minister Ashwini Vaishnaw said:
“OpenAI’s decision to establish a presence in India reflects the country’s growing leadership in digital innovation and AI adoption. As part of the IndiaAI Mission, we are building the ecosystem for trusted and inclusive AI, and we welcome OpenAI’s partnership in advancing this vision to ensure the benefits of AI reach every citizen.”
