Deepak Singh joins OpenAI as partner director, India

GREATER DELHI: A cloud veteran meets the AI moment. Deepak Singh has joined OpenAI as partner director, India, and his brief is a big one: helping build and scale go-to-market partnerships in the country. Announcing the move, Singh said he was excited to begin a new chapter, grateful for the opportunity and looking forward to the journey ahead.

The timing suits the man. Singh brings 23-plus years of enterprise experience, with more than 12 years in the cloud computing and data and AI ecosystem. He has worked for leading organisations including Intel, Hewlett Packard, VMware, Amazon Web Services and Google, and has been part of the build-up phase at AWS, Google Cloud and VMware in India and the SAARC region. That gives him rich experience of cloud adoption patterns across multiple industries, exactly what a fast-scaling AI company needs on the ground.

His most recent role was senior director, enterprise business, India, at Palo Alto Networks, from August 2025 to September 2026. There he led the enterprise business team for India and SAARC, managing a multi-million-dollar portfolio at build phase across customer segments. The focus was on helping enterprises and digital natives innovate bravely, navigate complex transitions, adopt practical AI applications and strengthen their cybersecurity posture, working closely with customers and partners to deliver measurable business outcomes.

Before that came four years at Google, from August 2021 to August 2025, as head, enterprises, corporate segment, India and SAARC. As a member of the Google Cloud India sales leadership team, Singh was responsible for building the corporate enterprise segment from the ground up. He owned customer relationships and joint success for more than 500 target accounts across manufacturing, ITES, BFSI, retail, CPG and digital natives, and hired and mentored a high-performing team of regional and territory managers. Working with specialists and the partner ecosystem, his team helped large enterprises innovate and transform using Google’s expertise in data analytics and GenAI workloads at scale. He also represented Google Cloud at industry forums across India and SAARC and contributed to hiring as part of the APAC hiring committee.

At AWS, Singh’s tenure was long and decorated. From September 2018 to August 2021, he was India partner leader, enterprise segment. He built and scaled the partner sales function, made up of senior partner success managers and partner specialist managers, to co-own the cloud consumption revenue goal for the India and SAARC enterprise segment, covering 1,600 accounts across conglomerates, BFSI, media, retail and CPG, manufacturing, ITES and GSIs. His focus included migration and modernisation, on deals of $1 million-plus ACV only, as part of the global launch team that conceptualised, built and scaled the engine behind the Migration Acceleration Program (MAP). He also drove enterprise application adoption, including SAP, Windows, VMware on AWS, database and data analytics, and set up segment-focused partner managers for manufacturing, global accounts, media and entertainment, telco, BFSI and ITES, and enterprise greenfield. He set up domain-specific partner sales motions for TME (telco and media and entertainment), MCRT (manufacturing, CPG, retail and travel), BFSI, global captives and enterprise greenfield, and created a teaming plan with GSIs including Wipro, TCS, Deloitte, PwC, IBM and CTS in large accounts, from opportunity-specific to account-specific plans of $1 million to $5 million ARR.

Between his two AWS stints, Singh spent three months, from June to August 2018, as head, channel and alliances, India and SAARC, at Alibaba Cloud. He was hired to run the partner ecosystem across services, ISV, distribution and consulting, and the stint was short owing to changing market dynamics around Alibaba’s growth plans in India.

Earlier, at AWS from January 2013 to June 2018 (five years and six months), he was an early member of the India team as business development manager. For his first two years he focused on onboarding and developing key partners across India, while managing territories in India and SAARC that lacked a dedicated AWS presence. After the AWS India region launched in 2016, he became senior partner manager, leading a team to scale the ecosystem. He established the India partnering relationship with the global system integrator ecosystem, launched a successful Partner Success Program for co-selling in new enterprise accounts, and built an ISV ecosystem tailored to verticals such as media. He also pioneered new routes to market and created proof of concept programmes to drive demand among start-ups and mid-market companies. The awards followed: Best Partner Manager Worldwide in 2014, Best Partner Manager for APAC in 2015, and Best Partner Manager for India in both 2017 and 2018.

At VMware, from February 2011 to January 2013, Singh was partner business manager for North and East India and Bangladesh, part of the company’s build-up phase in India. He managed regional relationships with OEMs such as HP, IBM, Dell, Cisco, NetApp and EMC, and handled large enterprise business partners and SIs including Wipro, HCL, Dimension Data, PC Solution and Progression for VMware’s virtualisation and cloud business. He developed and executed the channel development strategy, covering revenue and transactional goals, partner recruitment, enablement and marketing, and drove sales through large SIs and premier enterprise partners, appointing new regional solution partners.

At Hewlett Packard Enterprise, from June 2007 to February 2011, he was business manager and partner ecosystem builder. He joined as partner business manager to build the ecosystem for HP Enterprise products in servers, storage and software for the north region, handling commercial accounts and partner co-sell in the north territories across government and mid-size enterprises. He later moved to the HP software group to lead the information management services portfolio across the partner and customer ecosystem for the India north and east region.

His career began with channel and sales roles. He was channel manager at Intel Technology India Ltd from July 2005 to July 2007, handling channel business for the north upcountry region, and account manager at Wipro from March to June 2007, handling corporate business in the Greater Lucknow area. Before that, he was senior sales executive at Team Computers Pvt Ltd from January 2004 to March 2005, handling corporate customers in the Delhi NCR region.

Singh sums up his strengths in four competencies. As an ecosystem builder with an autonomous business model, he has set up ecosystems for Google Cloud (mid-size and corporate enterprise sales teams), AWS (large migrations and specialist teams), VMware (partner ecosystem), HP (server and software group) and Intel (non-metro business). He is resourceful, with experience of fast-paced early start-up businesses and of working through less-than-ideal partner ecosystem, programme and business readiness, market development funding and technology resource availability. He is strong on hiring and team building: a certified interviewer for cross-functional hiring at AWS and Google (APAC hiring committee), he has taken 350-plus interviews, hired and managed teams of 10 to 20, including managers with an average of 20-plus years of experience, and mentored more than 50 cross-functional team members across APAC. And he thinks big, aiming to build and execute measurable, market-making impact that “should outlast all of us”. He is also a certified speaker, having represented Google, AWS, VMware and HP at multiple industry-level events.

Outside the day job, Singh has been an industry advisor, independent board member and investor across multiple companies since May 2022, on a part-time basis. He is passionate about contributing to a services business as an active advisor to the ecosystem, follows fast-paced products and platform disruptors as an early investor, and mentors early-stage professionals and freshers, with a stated aim of creating more builders. He is a farmer by birth, a family legacy, and has a passion for cricket, supporting a cricket community group, Krickshetra Sports, for club cricket professionals and budding young players with limited resources. He is also an active sponsor for women leaders and for entrepreneurs from tier-three cities.

An ecosystem builder joins the company that wants to build the AI ecosystem. For OpenAI in India, it is a hire with the right scars and the right scoreboard.