OpenAI appears to have found a product and market fit for India’s youth. The company announced Friday that users between the ages of 18 and 24 accounted for nearly 50% of messages sent to ChatGPT in the country, while users under 30 accounted for 80%.
According to AI Lab, Indians primarily use ChatGPT for work, with 35% of all messages related to professional work, compared to 30% globally.
In particular, the company’s coding assistant, Codex, is attracting a lot of attention. OpenAI says Indians use Codex three times more than the global median, and weekly usage has increased four times since the tool was introduced to the Mac app two weeks ago. Users in India also ask three times more coding-related questions than the median.
This is in line with findings from Antropic, which announced earlier this week that 45.2% of Claude’s tasks address software-related use cases in India.
Outside of work, 35% of messages from Indians on ChatGPT asked for guidance, 20% asked general information concerns, and 20% asked the bot for help with writing or writing, according to OpenAI.
India is OpenAI’s second-largest market, with more than 100 million weekly users, and the company is actively trying to promote its AI tools and services to Indians. The company offers subscriptions for less than $5 in Japan, and last year it also ran a promotional campaign to encourage adoption.
“AI adoption is happening faster than our ability to measure it, creating challenges for those looking to make smart decisions. Signals is our way of bringing real-world evidence to the table, so India’s AI debate can be based on facts rather than hype,” Ronnie Chatterjee, chief economist at OpenAI, said in a statement.
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OpenAI has had a busy few days in India, with a major AI Impact Summit scheduled to take place in New Delhi this week. The company plans to open new offices in Mumbai and Bangalore this year, signed a major partnership with conglomerate Tata Group to secure 100 megawatts worth of AI computing power, and distributed ChatGPT Enterprise within Tata’s IT services subsidiary, TCS.
AI Lab has signed deals with fintech Pine Labs, travel platforms Ixigo and Makemytrip, and food and grocery delivery company Eternal. We also partnered with educational institutions to distribute tools to more than 100,000 students over the next six years.
