Asha spent years juggling odd jobs to put food on the table, until she discovered Vahan.ai through Zomato delivery riders in her Bengaluru neighbourhood. Initially hesitant, Asha eventually signed on as a delivery partner. Today, Asha is one of many Zomato delivery partners, earning about ₹30,000 per month, enough to send her two children to school.
Vahan.ai, India’s largest AI-powered recruitment platform for gig workers, on 1 May shared details about its collaboration with OpenAI, the global leader in artificial intelligence.
Powered by GPT-4o, this collaboration is accelerating access to employment for millions across the country and thus transforming the blue-collar recruitment landscape in India, the startup said in a statement.
Vahan.ai has built an AI recruiter that guides blue-collar job aspirants through the application process, according to a statement. “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,” it said.
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, the company said.
“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,” the statement said.
Expansion plans
Vahan.ai plans to expand the AI-recruiter to support eight additional Indian languages. This will be 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, the company said.
Like Asha, Ramu, a 26-year-old who very recently joined Zepto as a delivery partner via Vahan.ai. Ramu intends to return to his studies after saving some money. The Vahan.ai partnership with OpenAI 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 10 times 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 these leaders 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, the statement 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,” said Madhav Krishna, Founder and CEO of Vahan.ai.
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.
Solving human challenges
“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,” Pragya Misra, Policy & Partnership Lead at OpenAI, India said in the statement.
Our mission at Vahan.ai has always been rooted in the belief that access to work should not depend on one’s network.
We’re incredibly proud to see how OpenAI’s technology is being used to solve human challenges like employment access.
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.
“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,” she said.
