Sanjay Deshmukh
OpenAI has appointed Sanjay Deshmukh as its first Vice President of Asia Pacific sales, a hire that signals the ChatGPT maker is moving beyond product launches and into the harder work of building an enterprise sales machine across one of its fastest-growing markets.
Based in Singapore, Deshmukh will lead OpenAI’s commercial efforts across the region as more companies in Asia Pacific adopt AI tools for everyday business operations.
He reports to Chief Revenue Officer Dali Rajic and will work alongside OpenAI leaders including Kiran Mani and Oliver Jay, along with the company’s regional teams.
Also Read: AI gold rush: How OpenAI’s Singapore expansion could reshape the startup ecosystem
A veteran of enterprise software’s Asia playbook
Deshmukh’s appointment brings more than two decades of enterprise technology experience to OpenAI’s regional push. He joins from Elastic, the US-based search and data analytics software company, where he served as VP for Asia Pacific and Japan, a role he took on in 2025 to scale the company’s regional business, expand its partner ecosystem and deepen customer relationships.
Before Elastic, he spent time at Snowflake as senior VP for ASEAN and India, and prior to that built a long track record at VMware, including stints as VP and MD for Southeast Asia and Korea, and VP of end-user computing for Asia Pacific and Japan. His career also includes earlier roles at Citrix and SAP in India.
That trajectory (data platforms, cloud infrastructure, enterprise software, and now generative AI) mirrors the broader shift many enterprise sales leaders in the region are making, as companies that once sold storage, analytics or virtualisation now compete to sell AI capability instead. It also gives OpenAI a leader who has already built go-to-market teams from scratch in Southeast Asia, rather than one parachuting in cold.
Why Singapore, and why now
The hire lands at a moment when OpenAI is dramatically scaling up its physical and financial commitment to the region. The company first set up a presence in Singapore in 2024, pointing to Singaporeans’ unusually high per-capita use of ChatGPT, and has since deepened that bet considerably: in May 2026, it signed a memorandum of understanding with Singapore’s Ministry of Digital Development and Information at the ATxSummit, committing more than SGD300 million (~US$234 million) to establish its first Applied AI Lab outside the United States. That initiative, branded “OpenAI for Singapore,” spans enterprise AI deployment, talent development and wider public access to AI tools, and is expected to grow OpenAI’s Singapore-based technical team to more than 200 roles over the coming years.
More recently, the tech giant has reportedly been in talks to lease around 100,000 square feet across five floors of Shaw Tower in Singapore’s Beach Road district, a scale of office commitment that would dwarf its original regional footprint and put it among the largest AI company leases in Southeast Asia.
Also Read: Why GIC is backing Anthropic over OpenAI
Against that backdrop, hiring a dedicated Asia Pacific sales chief looks less like a symbolic appointment and more like a necessary piece of infrastructure. Building labs and signing government agreements is one thing; converting curiosity about AI into paid enterprise contracts across a region as fragmented as Asia Pacific — spanning wildly different languages, procurement norms, data regulations and levels of digital maturity — is another, and it needs someone who has done it before.
A crowded field of rivals
OpenAI is not the only AI company racing to plant its flag and its salespeople in the island nation. Anthropic, its closest rival in frontier AI development, has already secured roughly 100 desks at a flexible workspace in Ocean Financial Centre and has been actively hiring enterprise account executives across the region, including roles that require navigating government procurement frameworks in Singapore, India’s regulatory regime and processes across Australia and New Zealand. Anthropic has also been projecting rapid revenue growth, aiming to more than double its annualised revenue run rate in 2026 as enterprise adoption accelerates.
Beyond Anthropic, OpenAI faces entrenched competition from Google — which recently strengthened its own Asia Pacific presence with a DeepMind lab launch and whose Gemini models are already bundled deeply into enterprise tools used across Southeast Asian businesses — and Microsoft, which has spent years embedding Copilot into the Office and Azure ecosystems many regional enterprises already run on. Nvidia, too, has expanded its presence in Singapore with a new research centre focused on embodied AI and infrastructure efficiency, reinforcing that the competition for the region extends well beyond chatbots into the wider AI stack.
Also Read: For Singapore, the real AI race is institutional, not just technological
For Southeast Asian founders and enterprise buyers, this clustering of AI heavyweights in Singapore has an upside: more competition typically means faster product iteration, more localised support and better pricing pressure. But it also means the region is becoming a genuine battleground, not just a market to be served from headquarters and leadership hires like Deshmukh’s are as much a signal of intent as they are an operational necessity.
What comes next
OpenAI’s Singapore ambitions now rest on three pillars: the Applied AI Lab focused on national priorities such as education, healthcare and public services; a much larger physical office footprint; and now a sales organisation built by someone who has spent a career selling into the region’s toughest markets. Whether that combination translates into durable enterprise revenue, as opposed to headline-grabbing announcements, will likely become clearer over the next year, as Deshmukh’s team moves from hiring plans to actual customer wins.
The post OpenAI hires former Elastic and Snowflake exec Sanjay Deshmukh to lead Asia Pacific sales appeared first on e27.