New Delhi: Indians opened ChatGPT and pressed the microphone instead of the keyboard. That habit has now put the country at the top of the world's user table.
India is ChatGPT's largest market by weekly active users, and the local user base has doubled since January, OpenAI India managing director Prabhjeet Singh said. It was his first media interview since joining the company in August.
"In less than a year, it's doubling. It just gives you a sense of how people are beginning to find relevance and deep use cases," Singh said. In February, OpenAI said India had more than 10 crore weekly ChatGPT users. On a visit last year, chief executive Sam Altman called India the fastest-growing market and the second largest by users.
The growth has shaped the product. Users who go straight to the dictation button rather than type have pushed OpenAI towards voice and Indian languages. "Most of India actually doesn't use English as a primary. So real big focus is on Hindi and vernacular," Singh said, pointing to the Hindi voices Neer and Leher.
The company is also working to run the full model on entry-level smartphones with limited memory, alongside the low-cost ChatGPT Go plan that was earlier offered free to Indian users for a year.
Announcements on UPI and payments are expected in the coming weeks. OpenAI is working with Razorpay so Indian brands can advertise on ChatGPT.
Enterprise demand is shifting, Singh said, "from early days of pilots and demos, common early this year and late last year, to now scaled adoption and production-scale deployment". He did not give numbers.
Smaller businesses are finding their own uses. Singh cited traders writing customised festive messages for customers and single-person shops turning to it for marketing and inventory help, tasks larger firms hand to whole teams. He did not say how widely they are used or what they save.
On regulation, he said OpenAI was engaging with government agencies and enterprises on data protection, model safety and cybersecurity. "It is important that companies, govt infrastructure is protected against potential bad actors. So, I think we are making our models available at different levels of dialogue," he said, without specifying which models, to whom, or on what terms.
At the India AI Impact Summit in February, OpenAI announced offices in Mumbai and Bengaluru and launched OpenAI for India.