Artificial intelligence giant OpenAI has appointed India’s Kiran Mani as the head of its Asia-Pacific operations, as per a Bloomberg report.
Mani is currently the chief executive officer of India’s biggest streaming platform JioHotstar.
OpenAI has created a new role to rope in Mani. He will take office as managing director for Asia-Pacific in June, based out of OpenAI’s Singapore office. He will report to OpenAI’s Chief Strategy Officer, Jason Kwon.
According to the report, the latest move comes as OpenAI has doubled down on expanding into high-growth international markets such as Asia. The region is among the front runners in user adoption and enterprise demand for AI tools. India is emerging as a central market due to a large user base of over 1.4 billion people, the report said.
Moreover, OpenAI faces competition from giants like Anthropic and Alphabet, which are investing heavily to develop better models.
Mani’s appointment could be crucial for OpenAI, as he has over 25 years of experience in building and scaling large digital platforms across sectors such as consumer technology, mobile, cloud, and media streaming.
Mani was the chief executive of Viacom18’s digital business. Similar to JioHotstar, Viacom18 is also owned by Reliance Industries, with a controlling stake of over 70 percent.
Mani was also associated with Google as General Manager and Managing Director for the Android and Google Play ecosystems across Asia-Pacific and Japan.
He has also served at Microsoft and IBM, spanning India, the US, and Asia-Pacific markets.
According to other media reports, JioHotstar has also confirmed Mani’s departure in an internal note by Vice Chairman Uday Shankar to employees.
“After a nearly three-year stint, first with JioCinema and then with JioHotstar, Kiran Mani has chosen to move on and relocate overseas for personal reasons. I wanted to take this opportunity to thank Kiran for the outstanding role he has played in building our streaming business and the profound impact that his leadership has had on JioHotstar over the last few years,” Shankar said in the note.
