India, 3rd May, 2025:  Vahan.ai, India’s largest AI-powered recruitment platform for the gig economy, today shared how its collaboration with OpenAI, the global leader in artificial intelligence research and deployment, is transforming the blue-collar recruitment landscape in India. Powered by GPT-4o, this collaboration is accelerating access to employment for millions across the country

Vahan.ai has built an AI recruiter that guides blue-collar job candidates through the application process. The voice-based AI recruiter, which is capable of carrying out conversations in both English and Hindi over a regular phone call, increases human recruiter productivity nearly threefold, helping companies recruit more workers with greater efficiency. 

The core of Vahan.ai AI recruiter is powered by a fine-tuned version of OpenAI’s GPT-4o. This AI recruiter is capable of handling thousands of simultaneous conversations daily with fluency, empathy, and multilingual capabilities. Vahan.ai also heavily relies on GPT-4o mini, whose computational capabilities allow the AI-recruiter to handle conversations with a much lower latency. It transforms user interactions into smart, human-like conversations that build trust, guide decision-making, and remove the friction of traditional job and application systems.

Vahan.ai plans to expand the AI-recruiter to support eight additional Indian languages. This expansion is to be made possible by GPT-4o’s robust multilingual architecture, which allows AI to understand, interpret and respond in a wide range of regional languages with contextual accuracy. This feature would be especially valuable in a linguistically diverse country like India, where breaking language barriers is essential to ensuring that millions can access employment opportunities with ease and confidence

For lakhs in India, any stable source of income is a bridge out of abject poverty. Such was the case of Zomato delivery partner Asha from Bangalore, who spent years juggling odd jobs to put food on the table. Asha discovered Vahan.ai through Zomato delivery riders in her area. Despite the initial hesitation, Asha signed on as a delivery partner and is now a proud Zomato delivery partner, earning a steady income of approximately 30,000 INR per month, enough to send her two children to school.

Ashok from Bangalore was a caterer when Covid struck. Overnight, he was laid off and lost his livelihood. A friend of his recommended the Vahan.ai app to search for jobs, which led him to an opportunity with Swiggy. The AI recruiter helped him apply and start earning within a matter of days, bringing stability of income back to his family. There are also those like Ramu, a 26-year-old who very recently joined Zepto as a delivery partner via Vahan.ai and intends to return to his studies after saving some money. There are thousands of people every month, like Asha, Ashok, and Ramu, who can easily navigate the complicated mess of finding jobs in different parts of India, due to the presence of Vahan.ai’s AI recruiter.

The Vahan.ai x OpenAI partnership has also had a catalytic effect on grassroots entrepreneurship through Vahan Leaders (VLs) – small, local recruitment agencies that use Vahan.ai to match workers with jobs. Over the past 15 months, Vahan Leaders across India have seen growth of up to 10x in their operations. In Bangalore, four Vahan Leaders now place over 2000 workers each month, having scaled rapidly with the platform’s support. The NCR region has seen VLs double their monthly placements to 3,500 in just three months. In Mumbai, the number of individuals placed by Vahan Leaders who use the Vahan.ai platform increased by 10x, 4x for agencies in UP and 6x for agencies in MP. 

Commenting on the collaboration, Madhav Krishna, Founder and CEO of Vahan.ai, said, “Our mission at Vahan.ai has always been rooted in the belief that access to work should not depend on one’s network. With the power of OpenAI’s GPT-4o, we’ve built an AI recruiter that doesn’t just process job applications—it listens, understands, and guides individuals through what is often a deeply personal journey. The AI here acts as an amplifier of human capabilities—the capabilities of our Vahan Leaders—and not a replacement. What we’re seeing on the ground is remarkable: people who were previously excluded from formal employment channels are now finding jobs in hours, not months. 

For us, this is more than just hiring at scale, it’s about restoring agency and dignity to millions who’ve long been at the mercy of opaque systems. The collaboration with OpenAI has enabled us to bring intelligence and empathy into every interaction a job seeker has with our platform. We’re proud that AI is no longer just a buzzword in tech circles—it’s a bridge to financial security, education, and long-term dreams for workers like Asha, Ashok, and Ramu across India.”

Pragya Misra, Policy & Partnership Lead at OpenAI, India said. “We’re incredibly proud to see how OpenAI’s technology is being used to solve human challenges like employment access. The wide-scale collaboration with Vahan.ai underscores our commitment to enabling real-world impact through AI. The initial phase of our work together is already delivering measurable outcomes- connecting thousands to meaningful livelihoods while also laying the foundation of how AI can reshape the future of inclusive and intelligent employment ecosystems in India”

Based in Bengaluru, Vahan.ai was founded when Madhav Krishna, returned to India from the US and recognised the scale of information asymmetry in the Indian job market. Vahan.ai was created to bridge this gap and bring access and opportunity to the grassroots.

Vahan.ai currently helps approximately 40,000 individuals secure jobs monthly in the blue-collar gig economy with platforms such as Zepto, Swiggy, Blinkit, Zomato, etc This network effect underscores how AI isn’t just connecting people to jobs—it’s enabling local ecosystems of employment to flourish. 

As Vahan.ai expands its footprint, its vision remains clear: to create pathways to prosperity for millions of individuals by making access to opportunity as simple as a conversation.