AI will help define India’s future, and India will help define AI’s future

I’ll be in India this week for the Global AI Impact Summit, where conversations will focus on expanding access to AI and putting it to work for more people, in more parts of the country, as quickly as possible.

The momentum is clear. As of this month, India has 100 million weekly active users, giving it the second largest user base of any country in the world besides the US. It has the largest number of students on ChatGPT worldwide, a sign of how many young people here are treating AI as a way to learn faster and get ahead. And it ranks fourth globally in the use of Prism, our free new tool for scientific research and collaboration.

But bringing AI’s benefits to more people means broadening access, adoption, and agency. Access is the admission ticket; without it, people and institutions cannot participate fully in the AI era. Adoption is putting AI to work in classrooms, workplaces, and public services. Agency is what turns access and adoption into impact by giving people the ability and confidence to use AI to learn faster, build more, and make better decisions. When the three align, more people can participate not just as users of AI, but as builders and beneficiaries of the growth it enables.

India, the world’s largest democracy, has all the ingredients to be a full-stack AI leader: optimism about what AI can do for the country, homegrown tech talent, and a national strategy for how to incorporate the technology more widely. India gets that we need to use AI to just build things to drive human progress. To that end, the govt’s IndiaAI Mission is designed to expand the country’s compute capacity, support startups, and accelerate multilingual applications that improve public service delivery, including in healthcare and agriculture. It is an effort to make sure AI is not confined to a small slice of early adopters but becomes an essential tool for hundreds of millions of people across India.

It’s critical to get that balance right. If AI access and adoption are uneven, AI’s upside will be uneven, too. Many people may have access to the tools, but far fewer will know how to use them well enough to translate that access into real gains. We call that the capability overhang and left unaddressed, it risks concentrating productivity and economic gains in a few hands rather than ensuring that people everywhere benefit from the technology. Given India’s size, it also risks forfeiting a vital opportunity to advance democratic AI in emerging markets around the world.

OpenAI is committed to doing its part to help build AI in India, with India, and for India. We’ve made our tools available for free so they’re accessible to Indians regardless of their income, education, or familiarity with technology.

We’re also focused on practical, near-term steps that can be taken now to help Indians unlock AI’s transformative power. Three things make the difference: equipping more people with AI literacy, building the computing and energy infrastructure that powers advanced AI systems, and integrating AI more fully into real workflows.

First, AI literacy at scale. Not abstract familiarity, but practical fluency in coding, knowledge work, and other real-world uses of AI to write, analyse, plan, learn, and solve problems in ways that match the work in front of you. That means helping students and workers develop both AI skills and confidence in their ability to use them. This is how access turns into adoption, and how adoption turns into agency.

Second, the infrastructure that makes adoption possible at national scale. AI runs on computing capacity and the energy to power it. Infrastructure is destiny, and countries that build those foundations will be in a stronger position to shape the future of this technology and realise more of its upside.

Third, integration into real workflows. People adopt AI fastest when it helps with the work in front of them, not when it adds a new system to learn. Put AI to work in classrooms, clinics, small businesses, and public services, and it can increase productivity, expand the frontiers of what is possible, and deliver tangible value quickly.

This agenda is urgent for another reason: AI itself is moving from systems that primarily answer questions to systems that can accelerate cutting-edge scientific research and take action in the physical world, including robotics.

None of this works without trust. Individuals need confidence in the tools they are using, and institutions need clear ways to deploy them responsibly. Different users also need different protections, especially younger users, who deserve stronger safeguards as they learn how to use these tools. If we want AI to expand opportunity, safety and reliability have to keep pace with capability.

India brings something important to this moment: optimism about what AI can do, matched with a serious national effort to make it real. With its focus on access, practical AI literacy, and the infrastructure that supports widespread adoption, India is well positioned to broaden who benefits from the technology and to help shape how democratic AI is adopted at scale.

That’s exactly why I am here, and why we’re leaning in for the long term. We recently brought more than 200 nonprofit leaders together across four cities in India to learn how to use ChatGPT to extend their teams’ capacity and deepen their impact. We opened our first office in Delhi last August and plan to expand our footprint this year. We will soon be announcing new ways of partnering with the Indian govt to put access to AI and its benefits within reach for more people across the country.

What happens next even more. AI will help define India’s future, and India will help define AI’s future. And it will do so in a way only a democracy can.

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