The 11-year Uber veteran will serve as managing director for India, reporting to OpenAI's Asia Pacific chief starting in September
OpenAI is planting its flag in India with a heavyweight hire. The company has tapped Prabhjeet Singh, who spent over a decade at Uber including a stint as President of Uber India and South Asia, to serve as its Managing Director for India.
Singh will report to Kiran Mani, OpenAI’s Managing Director for the Asia Pacific region, and is expected to start the role in September. His mandate covers consumer growth, enterprise adoption, regulatory engagement, and general operations across one of the world’s most digitally ambitious markets.
From ride-hailing to AI: Singh’s playbook #
Singh joined Uber back in August 2015 and stayed for 11 years. He led Uber’s India and South Asia business for the last six years of that stretch, navigating a market known for its complexity, regulatory hurdles, and sheer scale.
His educational pedigree reads like a greatest-hits compilation of Indian institutions. Singh holds an undergraduate degree from IIT Kharagpur and an MBA from IIM Ahmedabad, two of the country’s most competitive programs. Before Uber, he cut his teeth at Lehman Brothers and McKinsey & Company, giving him a blend of finance, consulting, and operational chops.
As the most senior OpenAI executive in India, Singh will essentially be the face of the company in a market that both Silicon Valley and homegrown competitors are eyeing with increasing intensity.
Why India, why now #
OpenAI has been on an aggressive international expansion push, and bringing in a dedicated country leader for India signals that the company views the market as worthy of its own operational infrastructure rather than managing it from a regional hub.
What this means for the AI landscape #
The hire also reflects a maturing of OpenAI’s organizational structure. Appointing a Managing Director who reports into a regional Asia Pacific lead (Mani) rather than directly to the C-suite in San Francisco suggests the company is building out a proper multinational operating model.
The September start date gives OpenAI a few months to prepare the operational groundwork. At Uber, Singh had to manage enterprise deals, consumer product launches, and regulatory groundwork simultaneously. OpenAI is betting he can pull off the same trick in a very different industry.
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