India is teaching Google how AI in education can scale
As AI races into classrooms worldwide, Google is finding that the toughest lessons on how the tech can actually scale are emerging not from Silicon Valley, but from India’s schools.
India has become a proving ground for Google’s education AI amid intensifying competition from rivals, including OpenAI and Microsoft. With more than a billion internet users, the country now accounts for the highest global usage of Gemini for learning, according to Chris Phillips, Google’s vice president and general manager for education, within an education system shaped by state-level curricula, strong government involvement, and uneven access to devices and connectivity.
Phillips was speaking on the sidelines of Google’s AI for Learning Forum in New Delhi this week, where he met with industry stakeholders, including K-12 school administrators and education officials, to gather feedback on how AI tools are being used in classrooms.
The scale of India’s education system helps explain why the country has become such a consequential testing ground. The country’s school education system serves about 247 million students across nearly 1.47 million schools, per the Indian government’s Economic Survey 2025-26, supported by 10.1 million teachers. Its higher education system is among the world’s largest as well, with more than 43 million students enrolled in 2021-22 — a 26.5% increase from 2014-15 — complicating efforts to introduce AI tools across systems that are vast, decentralized, and unevenly resourced.
Image Credits:Jagmeet Singh / TechCrunch
From entertainment to learning as the top AI use case
Google’s push also reflects a broader shift in how people are using GenAI. Entertainment had dominated AI use cases last year, said Phillips, who added that learning has now emerged as one of the most common ways people engage with the technology, particularly among younger users. As students increasingly turn to AI for studying, exam preparation, and skill-building, education has become a more immediate — and consequential — arena for Google.
India’s complex education system is also drawing increasing attention from Google’s rivals. OpenAI has begun building a local leadership presence focused on education, hiring former Coursera APAC managing director Raghav Gupta as its India and APAC education head and launching a Learning Accelerator program last year. Microsoft, meanwhile, has expanded partnerships with Indian institutions, government bodies, and edtech players, including Physics Wallah, to support AI-based learning and teacher training, highlighting how education is becoming a key battleground as AI companies seek to embed their tools into public systems.
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Gemini adds JEE Main preparation for Indian Engineering aspirantsImage Credits:Google