At CNBC-TV18’s Global Leadership Summit 2025 in Mumbai on Friday (November 7), Oliver J, Managing Director, International Strategy, at OpenAI, said that the company has been closely studying user behaviour in India to refine how it serves its global audience. Nearly half of ChatGPT’s users in India are under the age of 24, a demographic that, Oliver said, is shaping the company’s education-focused products.
Three years after ChatGPT redefined the way people interact with artificial intelligence, its second-largest market continues to offer insights shaping the tech.
“Students in India aren’t necessarily looking for answers — they want to understand how to reach those answers,” he said. “That insight shaped our new Study Mode, where ChatGPT doesn’t simply provide solutions but prompts users to think and learn.”
Oliver said OpenAI had sent researchers to India to observe how students interact with the tool firsthand.
“We see students using ChatGPT to learn better,” he said. “Education is the biggest use case for us in India, and the country’s young and curious user base is driving a lot of our innovation.”
AI at an inflection point
Insights from India’s wide-ranging users, from farmers to students, are likely to inspire more changes, especially as AI, Oliver J believes, is at an “inflection point.”
“2025, I’d say, in many ways, is the year we will remember as the year AI went from the chatbot era into the intelligence era,” he said, adding that AI should now go beyond generating responses to “solving, reasoning, and completing tasks.”
OpenAI now has over 800 million weekly active users and one million businesses adopting its technology.
If the company’s groundwork is any indication, India appears to be a priority market, especially as OpenAI has moved fast to launch new initiatives since announcing its first office space in New Delhi.
Just this week, it launched IndQA, a large-scale initiative aimed at improving its models’ understanding of local languages and cultural nuances. The company also made its premium plan, ChatGPT Go, free for 12 months in India.
“It helps that India also has an emergent innovative population, promising engineering talent, and hunger to adopt frontier AI,” Oliver said.
When it comes to building AI infrastructure in India, the OpenAI boss believes the risk of not having enough compute power is far greater than having more. “India is inspiring OpenAI to do great work. If you build for India, you can build for the world,” he told the audience.
Fast-emerging use cases
Asked if the company has begun seeing returns on its investments, “Absolutely,” pat came the response from Oliver J — especially in customer support, which he described as a very mature use case.
The trip to India, he said, has also reinforced his faith in the country’s engineering talent and inspired confidence in AI’s commerce applications, particularly as a practical shopping partner.
“Coming out of this trip, I’m more confident commerce can be incredible… transformed by AI,” he said.
“I’m terrible at gifting,” he quipped. “So I asked ChatGPT to help me pick something for my wife — and it actually worked.”
For now, the OpenAI’s priority in India remains engaging with the government on policy and ensuring AI benefits humanity.
