OpenAI appears to have struck a chord with India’s younger population, with recent usage data showing remarkable engagement among 18- to 24-year-olds. The company reported on Friday that this demographic accounted for nearly 50% of all ChatGPT messages sent in India, while users under 30 made up 80% of total messages.

How Indians Are Using ChatGPT

OpenAI said that Indians primarily use ChatGPT for work-related tasks, which make up 35% of all messages, slightly higher than the 30% global average. The breakdown of usage outside professional tasks includes:

• 35% – Guidance and advice
• 20% – General information queries
• 20% – Content creation or writing assistance

The Codex coding assistant is seeing particularly strong adoption:

• Indian users employ Codex three times more than the global median.
• Weekly usage has quadrupled since Codex received a Mac app two weeks ago.
• Coding-related questions from Indian users are three times higher than the global median.

This aligns with findings from Anthropic, which reported that 45.2% of Claude’s tasks in India are software-related.

India as a Key Market

India is OpenAI’s second-largest market, with over 100 million weekly users, and the company is actively investing to expand its presence:

• Offering a sub-$5 subscription tier for affordability.
• Running promotional campaigns to spur adoption.
• Opening new offices in Mumbai and Bengaluru this year.
• Partnering with conglomerate Tata Group to secure 100 megawatts of AI compute capacity and distribute ChatGPT Enterprise via TCS.

OpenAI has also signed agreements with:

• Fintech: Pine Labs
• Travel platforms: Ixigo and MakeMyTrip
• Food & grocery delivery: Eternal

Additionally, the company has partnered with educational institutes to distribute AI tools to over 100,000 students over the next six years.

OpenAI’s Perspective

“AI adoption is moving faster than our ability to measure it – and that’s a challenge for anyone trying to make smart decisions. Signals is our way of putting real-world evidence on the table, so India’s AI debate can be grounded in facts, not hype,”
— Ronnie Chatterji, OpenAI Chief Economist

The strong engagement in India underscores the country’s growing role as a major market for AI adoption, particularly among young professionals and coders.