Why India is the new frontline in the AI user race

OpenAI, Google and Perplexity have launched an aggressive push to win artificial intelligence users in India, rolling out free and heavily discounted plans in a move analysts say is also aimed at collecting large volumes of multilingual training data from the world’s most populous country.

India is the world’s second-largest smartphone market, with about 730 million devices in use. Indians consume an average of 21 gigabytes of mobile data each month, paying about 9.2 cents per gigabyte, among the lowest rates globally, making the country particularly attractive for mass adoption of AI tools.

To draw in price-sensitive users, Google began offering its $400 Gemini AI Pro subscription free for 18 months in November to around 500 million customers of Reliance Jio, India’s largest telecom operator. Last week, Google also added India to dozens of countries where it is offering its discounted “AI Plus” package.

OpenAI has followed a similar strategy. In November, it made its ChatGPT Go plan — which offers extended but not unlimited usage — free for a year in India. The same plan carries charges in more than 100 other countries and was priced at $54 in India before being made free nationwide. As with Google’s offer, the free package is available only in India.

Early data points to a sharp rise in usage following the rollout of free plans. Daily active users of ChatGPT in India surged 607 per cent year on year to 73 million as of last week, more than double the number in the United States, according to figures from Sensor Tower compiled for Reuters.

Google’s Gemini has also seen growth. Its daily users in India rose 15 per cent after the Reliance Jio offer began in November, reaching 17 million last week, compared with about 3 million in the United States, the data showed. Sensor Tower said India is now the largest market by daily users for both chatbots.

Perplexity has taken a similar approach. It is offering its Pro tool, priced globally at $200 a year, free for a year to users of Indian telecom operator Airtel. The company says the plan provides unlimited access to its most advanced research tools.

India now accounts for more than a third of Perplexity’s global daily active users, up from just 7 per cent last year, according to Sensor Tower data.

Training fills data gaps

OpenAI’s India executive, Pragya Misra, has said on social media that making ChatGPT Go free reflects the company’s “continued India-first commitment” and its aim to make AI tools more accessible.

However, five AI analysts said the strategy also allows companies to tap India’s linguistic diversity to secure critical training data.

They said user-generated data from India, marked by frequent mixing of languages and dialects, offers a valuable test bed for AI models to learn complex communication patterns that are under-represented in existing datasets.

“Free plans fill gaps in AI training data sets that currently lack information on user behaviour patterns in the region,” said Sagar Vishnoi, co-founder of AI think tank Future Shift Labs.

Freebies often work in India

Aggressive pricing has a long track record in India’s digital economy.

Billionaire Mukesh Ambani’s Reliance, which has partnered with Gemini, used free data and voice services at its 2016 telecom launch to rapidly build scale.

Reliance Jio now has more than 500 million users.

Reliance and Disney also streamed cricket for free on their India platforms before merging their local media operations.

ChatGPT is currently seeing particularly strong engagement. In November, 46 per cent of its monthly users in India opened the app daily, compared with 20 per cent for Perplexity and 14 per cent for Gemini, according to Sensor Tower.

Anees Hassan, a 33-year-old PhD student in Hyderabad, said he uses the free ChatGPT and Gemini plans for about three hours a day to find citations, refine writing and generate images for presentations.

“The free plan was not good enough as I used to hit chat limit caps faster,” Hassan said.

He added that he remains cautious about data use. “I am concerned about data harvesting, so I have used the opt-out feature to stop sharing my data for AI training.”

(With inputs from Reuters)