OpenAI CTO confirms FDE teams in India as ChatGPT usage doubles and DevDay hits Bengaluru

Speaking to media ahead of OpenAI’s DevDay Exchange in Bengaluru on October 16, Vijaye Raji, Chief Technology Officer for Applications, said OpenAI aims to keep most products self-serve while deploying forward-deployed engineering (FDE) teams to help large enterprises integrate its models with existing systems. The company already has FDE teams in India that work directly with local enterprises on implementation and integration, and it maintains offices in Mumbai, Bengaluru and Delhi.

Raji also said ChatGPT usage in India has doubled over the past year and that token usage for coding tools has grown about 17-fold since February, with adoption spanning startups and large companies beyond software development into areas such as finance and legal. OpenAI is rolling out GPT-Live-1.1 with improved multilingual and mixed-language speech, including two Hindi voices (Neer and Leher), reflecting what Raji called an “audio-first” Indian market.

For Forward Deployed Engineers, the briefing is a rare on-the-record confirmation that OpenAI’s FDE model is active in India—not only in US, European and East Asian hubs already reflected in public job ads—alongside consumer localization and enterprise coding growth. It positions India as both a large developer market and a deployment theater where FDEs sit with customers to close the last mile from models to production systems.