India becomes the brief in OpenAI’s global playbook

Main article: When OpenAI announced its India-only plan for ChatGPT at INR 399 earlier this week, it was easy to read the news simply as a pricing story. But to stop there would be to miss the bigger shift.

This move is not about making AI cheaper. It is about making AI accessible, usable, and normalised in one of the most complex markets in the world.

In fact, this is a watershed moment: India has moved from being a peripheral ‘emerging market’ in global technology strategies to being the brief itself. We have entered an era where the AI model makers have started racing towards more users (and, therefore, more data) and leadership positions.

India, with its 1.4 billion people, is a clear target. ChatGPT expects India to be its largest market by number of users very soon; so, there is a focus on India.

Why INR 399 is not just about price

At first glance, INR 399 a month looks like an affordability play. After all, India has long been seen as a price-sensitive market where global products are forced to adapt to lower purchasing power. But the real story here lies elsewhere in how Indians pay, not how much.

The integration of Unified Payments Interface (UPI) into ChatGPT’s subscription stack is the true game changer. Over 500 million Indians use UPI every month, many bypassing cards and wallets altogether.

By solving for this payment friction, OpenAI has unlocked access to a massive user base that global SaaS and subscription models have often struggled to monetise. This isn’t about discounts; it’s about distribution.

The playbook has precedent

We have seen this localisation playbook succeed before. Take the case of OTT major Netflix. It tore up its global pricing strategy with the INR 199 mobile-only plan, recognising that single-device streaming was India’s dominant mode of consumption.

And who can miss how McDonald’s re-engineered its global menu for Indian tastebuds. It included the aloo tikki and the Maharaja Mac burgers, which are now a staple across its outlets in the country and probably amongst the higher revenue grossers.

Spotify too went hyper-local with curated playlists in multiple languages. the audio platform quickly understood that Bollywood and regional music drive far more listens than Western charts. Today, everything from bhajans to soulful Kishore Kumar melodies can be found on the app.

The pattern is clear: India resists copy-paste global strategies. Success here comes only to those who are willing to rewire for India’s payment systems, consumption behaviours, and cultural codes. OpenAI’s new plan is simply the latest chapter in this long story of adaptation.

Localisation is no longer optional

For brand marketers, there is a larger lesson in all this: localisation is no longer ‘good to have’; it is existential. Global firms that treat India as just another stop on their emerging markets checklist will lose out to those who take the time to decode and design for India.

AI adoption in India will not be driven by pricing gimmicks. It will be driven by solving for the frictions that global products often overlook key aspects like payments. UPI, prepaid wallets, and micro-transactions matter more than credit cards.

Moreover, over 90% of India’s internet users are non-English speakers; conversational AI must adapt accordingly. Indian users also consume information differently, often preferring shorter, more layered, multilingual content experiences. Brands, accordingly, need to realign their content strategy.

India is not one market but is a tiered economy. Metros, tier-2, -3 and rural cities each have their different thresholds of affordability, literacy, and tech fluency. Marketers who fail to design for these realities will find themselves locked out of the mainstream.

The competitive ripple effect

OpenAI’s move will not remain isolated. Expect rivals like Google’s Gemini or Anthropic’s Claude to soon follow with India-specific offers. This competition will accelerate AI’s mainstreaming in the country, creating a virtuous cycle of innovation and adoption.

But there is also a danger here. We must resist the temptation to over-play this as some kind of ‘Made-for-India’ revolution. In reality, this is a pragmatic go-to-market strategy. While it might not appear to be glamorous, it matters because it lowers the barriers to adoption at scale.

Just as Amazon’s cash-on-delivery strategy or Netflix’s INR 199 plan may not have seemed visionary at first, they fundamentally changed how Indians interacted with those platforms. OpenAI’s INR 399 plan may play a similar role in normalising paid AI usage in a country that has historically been reluctant to pay for digital services.

The end of excuses

There is also a hard truth for marketers. If OpenAI a company at the bleeding edge of technology, headquartered in San Francisco can adapt its product and distribution model for India, then no global or local brand can afford to hide behind excuses anymore.

For years, India has been used as a rhetorical flourish in global boardrooms: ‘a promising emerging market, but not yet ready.’ That framing no longer holds. The digital infrastructure of India from Aadhaar to UPI to low-cost mobile data has leapfrogged many developed markets. India is not playing catch-up; it is defining new standards that others are learning from.

In that sense, OpenAI’s plan is less about AI and more about a shift in mindset. India is now the market.

For marketers, the implications are profound. They need to recalibrate their strategy and stop treating India as a low-cost variant of their global playbook. Instead, it is time they start treating it as a market that requires a first-principle design.

Marketers also need to solve for distribution, not discounts. Reducing price is easy. Solving for friction points in payments, language, and user experience is harder and far more impactful.

Brands have to design for the many Indias. Urban and rural, English and vernacular, affluent and aspirational India is a mosaic. Building one-size-fits-all strategies will fail.

They should also be prepared for scale because India does not do linear growth. When something clicks here whether it is WhatsApp, Paytm, or Jio it scales at a speed and intensity few markets can match.

And most importantly, they need to look beyond transactions. Just as UPI was not about digital wallets but about building trust and convenience, AI adoption will not be about subscription costs but about making technology intuitive and indispensable.

OpenAI’s INR 399 plan is not a footnote in global pricing strategy. It is a signal that India can no longer be approached with half-measures or copy-paste solutions. By adapting to India’s payment ecosystem and consumption habits, OpenAI has normalised the idea of paying for AI a cultural and behavioural shift that could ripple far beyond the tech industry.

For marketers, the message is unambiguous: India is not the sideshow anymore. India is the show. And if you are not ready to rewrite your playbook for this market, you might find that the market has moved on without you.

- Jaspreet Bindra, co-founder, AI&Beyond