ElevenLabs names Karthik Rajaram as India head

ElevenLabs has named Karthik Rajaram as its general manager and country head for India, a move that underlines how seriously the company is betting on India as AI voice and audio adoption speeds up across industries. For the ai world organisation community, this is a clear signal that India’s voice-AI market is shifting from experimentation to scaled, enterprise-grade execution—exactly the kind of momentum that the ai world summit and ai world organisation events are designed to spotlight.

ElevenLabs sharpens its India focus

ElevenLabs’ appointment of Karthik Rajaram as general manager and country head for India positions him to lead go-to-market strategy, accelerate revenue growth, and build partnerships across AI, media, and enterprise segments as the company expands local presence and teams. The company has explicitly tied its India push to demand from enterprises, developers, and creators—use cases that require reliable voice generation and audio workflows at production scale, not just demos.

This leadership hire also aligns with ElevenLabs’ broader “India-scale” narrative: the company has described building a dedicated go-to-market team on the ground, forging local partnerships, and collaborating with Indian enterprises, startups, and creators to support natural-sounding voice experiences across real-world customer engagement and storytelling workflows. ElevenLabs has also highlighted a focus on regional accessibility through Indian language support in its models (including Hindi and Tamil, and additional Indian languages supported in its newer model releases).

In practical terms, India is not being treated as a satellite market; it is being framed as a proving ground for what it takes to deploy voice AI where language variety, accent diversity, and high-volume interactions are the default. That’s a meaningful cue for anyone tracking where platform companies are investing next—and a timely lens for discussions at the ai world summit, especially for audiences planning for ai world summit 2025 / 2026 programming around multilingual AI, synthetic media, and responsible deployment.

Why Karthik Rajaram is a strategic hire

Rajaram brings more than two decades of experience scaling technology businesses in India, with his most recent role cited as general manager and vice president for India and South Asia at Elastic, where he led regional expansion and helped position India as a strategic growth market. His career also includes leadership roles at Freshworks, Akamai Technologies, and Microsoft, spanning cloud, security, and enterprise technology adoption—domains that map closely to what enterprise buyers ask about when they evaluate voice AI: reliability, governance, integration, and measurable outcomes.

From a market-readiness perspective, this matters because voice AI is rarely purchased as a “cool feature”; it is adopted as infrastructure inside customer experience, content pipelines, product interfaces, and internal workflows, and those deployments quickly run into questions about procurement, compliance, and operational scale. ElevenLabs’ stated expectations for the role—owning go-to-market, partnerships, and revenue growth—suggest the company is preparing for deeper penetration into India’s enterprise and platform ecosystem rather than relying only on self-serve creator growth.

Rajaram has also publicly positioned India as a central arena for the AI and digital content shift, linking his move to the growth of human-like, scalable voice experiences across media, customer engagement, gaming, and education. In other words, the mandate is broad: build the market, expand partnerships, and make the company’s voice stack easier to adopt across multiple high-demand verticals—topics that naturally intersect with the ai world organisation’s focus on ecosystem-building through ai conferences by ai world and long-term industry collaboration.

India’s voice-AI moment is accelerating

ElevenLabs leadership has described India as one of the most important markets for the future of AI voice and audio, pointing to the country’s developer ecosystem, fast-growing digital economy, and strength in content, media, and technology services as key reasons for long-term investment. At the same time, the company has repeatedly emphasized India’s linguistic diversity and rapid digital adoption as core drivers of voice AI demand—because voice interfaces are often the most intuitive way to reach users across languages and literacy levels when designed responsibly.

On the product side, ElevenLabs has discussed prioritizing regional accessibility and supporting multiple Indian languages in its voice models, presenting this as a foundation for “India-scale” adoption—whether the workload is millions of customer interactions, multilingual content ecosystems, or voice-first startup products. The same theme shows up in how the company frames agentic use cases in India: it has written about voice AI infrastructure that supports real outcomes (like scheduling, onboarding, and customer conversations) and highlighted a broader shift from “voice generation” to full voice-agent deployment.

For the ai world organisation audience, the bigger takeaway is not just one appointment—it’s the pattern: global AI platforms increasingly treat India as a market where multilingual complexity, high throughput, and cost sensitivity force better engineering and clearer business value. That pattern is precisely why the ai world summit and ai world organisation events can add value by convening builders, enterprise leaders, media innovators, and policy stakeholders to compare deployment playbooks and discuss what “trustworthy voice” means in practice.

What enterprises, developers, and creators should watch

ElevenLabs has said Rajaram will build partnerships across AI, media, and enterprise segments, which implies a deliberate effort to embed the platform across the ecosystems that shape distribution in India—large services firms, media networks, consumer internet companies, and fast-moving startups. As those partnerships deepen, the most immediate change many teams will feel is not “more demos,” but better enablement: clearer GTM packaging, stronger local support, and tighter integration paths for production use cases that span speech generation, dubbing, and voice agents.

The company has already positioned its India work around enterprise and developer momentum, describing local collaboration with Indian companies and developers and pointing to how voice AI can reimagine how people connect, learn, and do business through natural-sounding voices. It has also written about voice agent infrastructure in India and how startups can use a large catalog of voices (including accent and tone diversity) to build applications from customer support and CX to vertical assistants across domains such as healthcare, banking, and commerce.

At the same time, the India opportunity comes with real operational expectations: any serious voice rollout must address accuracy, accent handling, language switching, brand safety, and governance in content workflows, especially when used in customer engagement or media contexts. This is where industry forums become practical, not promotional—because the teams scaling voice AI need shared standards, vendor transparency, and cross-functional learnings, and that’s exactly the kind of exchange that ai conferences by ai world and the ai world summit are built to facilitate for ai world summit 2025 / 2026.

How this connects to The AI World Organisation

For the ai world organisation, leadership moves like this are more than corporate news—they are market signals that help shape event agendas, roundtable themes, and the partnerships that power meaningful outcomes at the ai world summit. When a company invests in senior leadership and local teams, it usually precedes deeper ecosystem commitments: more partner integrations, more enterprise deployments, more developer programs, and more demand for credible conversations about responsible adoption.

This is also why ai world organisation events should keep a close lens on “voice + agents” as a combined trend rather than treating voice as a standalone media feature, since ElevenLabs has described an evolution toward enabling complete voice-native applications and agent deployments. In the run-up to ai world summit 2025 / 2026, the ai world organisation community can use announcements like Rajaram’s appointment as a prompt to ask sharper questions—what does scalable, trustworthy voice mean across India’s languages, what guardrails are becoming standard, and what measurable ROI models are emerging in CX, education, and content localization.

Ultimately, this appointment reads like a “now is the time” moment for India’s AI audio ecosystem: the platform vendors are investing, the use cases are expanding across sectors, and the market is ready for deeper collaboration between builders, buyers, and policy voices. That combination is exactly what the ai world summit aims to capture—turning fast-moving news into structured dialogue, partnerships, and actionable learnings for the next wave of AI adoption