OpenAI is working on improving the language capabilities of its artificial intelligence (AI) models for Indian languages such as Hindi and Tamil, Srinivas Narayanan, vice president of engineering, told Moneycontrol in an interview at its headquarters in Silicon Valley.
This move comes as the ChatGPT maker looks to court India's booming AI developer community amid intensifying rivalry with tech giants such as Google, Microsoft and Meta, all of whom are investing heavily to tap into one of the world's largest developer bases.
"India has incredibly creative developers with a deep tech ecosystem. You have people who actually are open to embracing new technology, along with a government which is super excited about making AI more accessible through the National AI Mission," Narayanan said.
India has emerged as the fastest-growing market for the ChatGPT maker and is now its second-largest market outside the United States.
The company surpassed 500 million weekly active users globally as of March 2025, fueled by the growing adoption of its AI chatbot and the viral popularity of ChatGPT's recent image generation feature.
India accounts for 13.5 percent of ChatGPT’s overall users, as per market research firm Sensor Tower.
The country, which is the world’s second largest internet market, is also a critical market for OpenAI as the firm looks to scale up its revenues, particularly in the Asian continent.
The AI research company is investing efforts in making its offerings more affordable for developers in the country, as part of a broader push to make AI accessible globally, Narayanan said.
"Over the last couple of years, the prices of our models have come down more than 100x. We believe that we need to continue to make models that push the frontier of both intelligence and price and we're constantly working on it" he said.
Moneycontrol had earlier reported that Indian startup founders and developers had sought India-specific pricing tiers along with more affordable rates from OpenAI CEO Sam Altman during his visit to the country in February 2025.
Education is a big use case for ChatGPT in India and globally, Narayanan said. "Consumers in India are using ChatGPT in lots of interesting ways for education, which we know Indian audiences deeply care about. We’re seeing it being used in a very significant way in India, and we’re going to lean in on that" he said.
India: A shining example of delivering AI at scale
Narayanan, an IIT Madras alumnus, believes that the country can be a "leader in the adoption of AI in society in a profound way"
"The energy that I see when talking to people, the willingness to innovate, and the amazing developer ecosystem - there's so much innovation happening in every one of the sectors where expertise is always at a premium in India," Narayanan said.
"I've talked to developers who are innovating in education, farming or providing legal assistance. When they see a technology like AI being able to deliver many of these, they are excited to embrace it. Therefore, I believe there will be tremendous innovation in using AI to provide these expert services at scale," he added.
Additionally, India can also serve as a shining example of how AI services can be delivered at massive scale while enabling people to innovate using the technology, Narayanan said.
"When you have an incredibly deep tech ecosystem and a citizen scale that large, eager to adopt something as transformative as AI, it creates a huge opportunity for India, both to solve problems for its own citizens at scale, and to be an inspiration for people around the world on how we make AI more beneficial for people," he said.
Gearing up for the agentic era
Even with all the rapid progress over the past few years, Narayanan believes we’re still at a very early phase of AI and the challenge will be to continue innovating and build "transformative products" that can reach global audiences at scale
"I don't want us to create a perception that somehow we have solved all the problems...There is still a lot of unforeseen research and product problems" he said.
One of the most crucial areas is building products for the agentic era. "The first ChatGPT was conversational. You ask a question, you get an answer. We're now in a phase where it's starting to take actions on your behalf" Narayanan said.
The complexity of the actions one can ask an AI will also grow over time, he noted. "Previously, it was doing seconds of work. Today, it's doing minutes of work. Two years from now, it should do hours or days of work," he said.
In January, OpenAI launched its first AI agent, Operator, that can use its own browser to perform repetitive tasks for consumers. This includes filling out forms or expense reports, buying groceries, making restaurant reservations, booking a taxi ride, or making e-commerce purchases among others.
Initially available in the United States, the company extended it to ChatGPT Pro subscribers in India and several other markets like Australia, Brazil, Singapore, the United Kingdom, Canada, and South Korea in February.
In the same month, OpenAI also unveiled Deep Research, an AI agent capable of performing in-depth, multi-step research on the Internet and compiling reports on complex topics. The agent also enables people to connect files from third-party services such as Box, Dropbox, GitHub, Microsoft OneDrive, and SharePoint, for real-time analysis.
Last month, the company introduced a research preview of Codex, a software engineering agent that can work on many tasks in parallel. This includes writing features, answering questions about your codebase, fixing bugs, and proposing pull requests for review among others.
Narayanan said that AI agents pose an interesting challenge across product, engineering, and design when making them accessible and comfortable for people to use.
"What does it mean for a personal assistant that understands you deeply? What do you trust it with? How does it talk to other personal assistants? We don't know how to solve all these, but we want to solve it one at a time, iteratively" he said.
Investment in AI infrastructure
To aid this growth and address scaling challenges, OpenAI is making significant investments in AI infrastructure, including the ambitious Stargate project.
"Our goal is to enable all different parts of the world to have infrastructure for AI that's useful and works for them," Narayanan said.
Last month, the company launched OpenAI for Countries, a new separate initiative within the Stargate project that will partner with governments to help them build out data center capacity and customise its products, including ChatGPT, for specific languages and local cultures.
At launch, OpenAI stated that its goal is to pursue 10 projects with individual countries or regions as the first phase of this initiative without disclosing any specific details.
The AI research major also recently announced data residency in India, Japan, Singapore, and South Korea for ChatGPT Enterprise, ChatGPT Edu, and the API Platform, helping organisations meet local data sovereignty requirements when using OpenAI products in their businesses and building new AI solutions.
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