In the fiercely competitive world of artificial intelligence (AI), having cutting-edge models is no longer enough. One needs to build an ecosystem that allows people to create, distribute, and monetise their AI products to attract the next wave of developers in markets like India, a top OpenAI executive told Moneycontrol.
"You need to have the best quality models. That's like a baseline, and we work very hard at that and don't take it for granted. But it’s not just about the models. You also need to build a platform that makes it easy for people to use the product," Srinivas Narayanan, CTO of B2B applications at OpenAI, told Moneycontrol on the sidelines of DevDay Exchange, the company’s first event focused on the country’s developer community.
He said this includes providing a set of tools that developers can use to build agents, ensuring they connect easily across different products in a company while remaining reliable, fast, and widely available, which he described as a platform layer.
Narayanan added that developers also deeply care about the distribution of their products.
“It’s not just about how you build an application, but can we give you opportunities to be showcased where our users are. ChatGPT is an amazing asset, with so many people coming to it. We’re trying to create an ecosystem that helps developers distribute and monetise their work as well,” he said.
Apps in ChatGPT
In October, OpenAI introduced a new Apps SDK in preview, that allows developers to build interactive applications within ChatGPT that has over 800 million weekly users across the world.
Among the initial apps available for users include Spotify, Canva, Booking.com, Coursera, Figma, Expedia, and Zillow. These apps are available to all logged-in ChatGPT users, except those located in the European Economic Area (EEA), Switzerland, and the United Kingdom.
Evaluating AI’s understanding of Indian languages and culture through IndQA
On November 4, OpenAI also unveiled IndQA, a new benchmark designed to evaluate how well AI systems understand and reason about questions in Indian languages across a wide range of cultural domains.
IndQA was developed in partnership with 261 domain experts across the country and includes 2,278 questions spanning 12 languages and 10 cultural domains, from literature and everyday life to food, history, and spirituality, the company said. The languages include Bengali, English, Hindi, Hinglish, Kannada, Marathi, Odia, Telugu, Gujarati, Malayalam, Punjabi and Tamil.
The company added that, unlike traditional benchmarks, IndQA’s questions are natively written rather than translated, reflecting the nuances of how people in India think, speak and ask questions.
"India has such a diverse set of people, speaking so many different languages, and with varied cultures and a deep history. AI needs to understand all of that. It's not just about building products from Silicon Valley that only understands the Western world. It is about making sure AI understands the nuances of every country and every culture," Narayanan said.
He added that the company hopes to take this benchmark as a playbook and apply it in other countries as well.
Read: OpenAI to give free 1-year ChatGPT Go subscription to India users amid big push
OpenAI's India developer push
Narayanan's comments come 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.
Google in particular has touted its full-stack approach to AI, investing across every layer of the technology stack, from research, models and tooling to product and platforms, and AI infrastructure.
India is the second-largest market for ChatGPT and one of its fastest-growing markets. OpenAI CEO Sam Altman had recently said that the country could soon become ChatGPT’s largest market.
India, 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.
In August, Moneycontrol had reported that OpenAI introduced rupee pricing for ChatGPT in India in a likely effort to simplify customer payments.
Localised pricing along with more affordable rates were among the key demands that Indian startup founders and developers had placed before OpenAI CEO Sam Altman during his India visit in February 2025, Moneycontrol reported earlier.
"We’re going to continue working with developers here and figure out eventually what makes sense for them. If this is a big thing that will unlock value, then we’ll certainly do that," Narayanan said.
"Ultimately it’s consistent with our vision to help meet developers where they are and help them solve problems for the local market," he added.
At the event, Emergent, an AI-powered app builder started by Dunzo co-founder Mukund Jha and his twin brother Madhav Jha, also announced the launch of ChatGPT apps on its platform. "Anybody can now come in, describe what they want to build, and create ChatGPT apps on the fly," Jha said.
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