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Considering a potential partnerships to expand their artificial intelligence offerings in the country, OpenAI, the artificial intelligence (AI) research and deployment company which owns ChatGPT are in discussion with Reliance Industries as per the latest reports.

ChatGPT Eyeing One-billion Internet Consumer Market

It appears that these companies are in discussion regarding a possibility involved a relationship between Reliance Jio and OpenAI to distribute ChatGPT.

So far,  these companies have given no confirmation about this partnership.

It won’t be an exaggeration to say that OpenAI is now eying its own Jio moment — the potential of one-billion internet consumer market which the American company is trying to tap with low-cost offerings.

This has started as OpenAI has already dived into the bottom of the AI market pyramid by launching a new, more affordable subscription tier in India known as ChatGPT Go which is  priced at Rs 399 per month.

“We just launched ChatGPT Go in India, a new subscription tier that gives users in India more access to our most popular features: 10x higher message limits, 10x more image generations, 10x more file uploads, and 2x longer memory compared with our free tier. All for Rs. 399,” announced by Nick Turley, OpenAI’s vice president and head of ChatGPT, on X.

Going For Mass Market Strategy

If you are wondering about the pricing, this new tier is far more affordable than OpenAI’s other existing plans.

For instance, the top-tier version of ChatGPT, ChatGPT Pro, is priced at Rs 19,900/month in India compared to the ChatGPT Plus it’s mid-range plan, costs Rs 1,999/month.

With this move, OpenAI is leveraging a mass market too as per the company’s mass market strategy.

So now the users in India will see subscription prices in rupees and they can make payments via UPI (Unified Payment Interface), a move likely aimed at improving accessibility for common users.

This move holds a great significance as India is ChatGPT’s second-biggest market after the United States and may well become the biggest soon.

If we compare by the number of installs, India holds the top market position, accounting for 13.7% of lifetime downloads, compared with second place, the US, which accounted for 10.3% of all downloads, as per the media reports.

Interestingly, the timing for OpenAI’s strategy to customize its services for mass users is immpaccable as several players, especially Gemini and Perplexity, are eying India’s vast consumer market where common people are increasingly using AI chatbots instead of internet search engines.

With this move, OpenAI aims to do what Reliance did with its low-cost strategy in India’s telecom market which has accumulated millions of users and retaining them with cheaper plans.

But this road won’t be that easy as OpenAI is likely to face intense competition from its rivals.