India is OpenAI’s biggest student market globally

India is home to the largest student population using ChatGPT globally, with millions of students using the artificial intelligence tool for activities ranging from exam preparation to exploring new ideas, according to OpenAI's Head of Education for India and Asia Pacific, Raghav Gupta.

The use of ChatGPT is also gaining momentum at educational institutions, Gupta said, with OpenAI providing more than 100,000 ChatGPT Edu licences across institutions including IIM Ahmedabad, IIM Indore, AIIMS New Delhi, Manipal Academy of Higher Education, UPES, Pearl Academy and DIT University.

At Delhi Public School Bangalore North, more than 350 educators have completed ChatGPT Foundations for Teachers, helping them build practical skills to use AI effectively in the classroom, he said.

However, Gupta said it was still too early to assess the full long-term impact of OpenAI's larger higher education partnerships in India on learning outcomes.

“Our larger higher-education partnerships in India are still at an early stage, so it will take time to assess their full long-term impact on learning outcomes,” he said.

Gupta said the focus should not simply be on the amount of AI being used in education.

“In education, the metric that matters is not how much AI gets used. It is whether students learn better because of it,” he said.

OpenAI's higher education initiative is working across institutions in different disciplines, including management, medicine and design. Gupta said the use of AI would differ depending on the subject and setting.

“AI in a medical setting should not look the same as AI in a management school, an engineering programme or a design classroom,” he said.

The company is also placing emphasis on the role of teachers in the adoption of AI. Gupta said institutions were more likely to see meaningful adoption when educators had the confidence and capability to shape how the technology entered classrooms.

“Teachers are where policy becomes practice,” he said, adding that responsible AI adoption could not be achieved simply by giving students and schools access to tools.

Looking ahead, Gupta said AI literacy would become increasingly important for students.

“By 2030, knowing how to write a good prompt will be a baseline skill. AI literacy will really be about judgement,” he said.

Students would still need strong foundations in mathematics, science, language and computational thinking, Gupta said, particularly because AI could generate answers that appeared plausible but were “wrong, incomplete or misleading”.

Students would also need to learn how to frame problems, provide context, ask better questions, interrogate answers and verify claims, he added.