Openai has announced plans to open its first office in India just days after the launch of a chatgpt plan tailored to Indian users as it seems to exploit the country’s rapidly growing AI market.
On Friday, the company said it would create a local team in India and open a business office in the capital, New Delhi, in the coming months. The move is based on Openai’s recent employment efforts in the region. In April 2024, the company formerly appointed Truecaller and Meta Executive Pragya Misra to its public politics and partnerships in India. Openai also brought the former Twitter India Head Rishi Jaitly as a senior adviser to help facilitate discussions with the Indian government about AI policy.
India world’s second largest internet and smartphone market after China is a natural fit for Openai, competing with tech giants like Google and Meta, as well as AI-UP STARTS as confusion, all of which want to use the country’s massive user base.
The company said it has begun to hire a local team to “focus on strengthening relationships with local partners, governments, businesses, developers and academic institutions.” It plans to get feedback from Indian users to make its products relevant to the local audience and even build features and tools specifically for the country.
“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 build AI for India and with India,” Sam Altman, CEO of Openai, said in a statement.
Openai also announced that it would host its first educational meeting in India this month and its first developer day in the country later in the year.
While India is clearly an important market for Openai, the company faces important challenges – including how to convert free users to pay subscribers. Like other major AI players, it must navigate the revenue interior of a price-sensitive South Asian market.
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Earlier this week, the company introduced its sub- $ 5 Chatgpt plan called Chatgpt Go, Price for $ 399 per Month (about $ 4.75), making it the first chatgpt plan in India to attract the masses. This came only a few days after the Arch-Rival’s confusion collaborated with the Indian Telco giant Bharti Airtel to give Airtels more than 360 million subscribers access to Perplexity Pro for 12 months.
Openai also faces challenges in integrating with Indian companies. In November, the Indian News Agency, asian News International (ANI) sued Openai for allegedly having used its copyrighted news content without permission. A group of Indian publishers joined this case in January.
Nevertheless, the Indian government actively promotes AI across its departments and aims to strengthen the country’s attitude on the global AI card – Momentum that Openai hopes to exploit.
“India has all the ingredients to become a global AI-leader-fantastic tech talent, world-class ecosystem and a strong government support through the Indiaai mission,” Altman said.
India is not Openai’s first Asian office location. The company opened previous offices in markets including Japan, Singapore and South Korea. Openai-Rival Anthropic also considered Japan as a higher priority market than India on the continent and recently created its Tokyo office rather than New Delhi.
One of the reasons why these AI companies do not prioritize India as an early market is the difficulty of securing corporate customers, a Silicon Valley-based investor source recently told TechCrunch.
“Openai’s decision to establish a presence in India reflects the country’s growing leadership in digital innovation and AI adoption,” said Indian IT Minister Ashwini Vaishnaw in a prepared statement. “As part of the Indiaai mission, we build the ecosystem for trusted and inclusive AI, and we welcome Openai’s partnership to promote this vision to ensure that the benefits of AI reach any citizen.”