India is teaching Google how AI in education can scale | TechCrunch

As AI races into classrooms worldwide, Google is finding that the toughest lessons on how the tech can actually scale are emerging not from Silicon Valley, but from India’s schools.

India has become a proving ground for Google’s education AI amid intensifying competition from rivals, including OpenAI and Microsoft. With more than a billion internet users, the country now accounts for the highest global usage of Gemini for learning, according to Chris Phillips, Google’s vice president and general manager for education, within an education system shaped by state-level curricula, strong government involvement, and uneven access to devices and connectivity.

Phillips was speaking on the sidelines of Google’s AI for Learning Forum in New Delhi this week, where he met with industry stakeholders, including K-12 school administrators and education officials, to gather feedback on how AI tools are being used in classrooms.

The scale of India’s education system helps explain why the country has become such a consequential testing ground. The country’s school education system serves about 247 million students across nearly 1.47 million schools, per the Indian government’s Economic Survey 2025-26, supported by 10.1 million teachers. Its higher education system is among the world’s largest as well, with more than 43 million students enrolled in 2021-22 — a 26.5% increase from 2014-15 — complicating efforts to introduce AI tools across systems that are vast, decentralized, and unevenly resourced.

One of the clearest lessons for Google has been that AI in education cannot be rolled out as a single, centrally defined product. In India, where curriculum decisions sit at the state level and ministries play an active role, Phillips said Google has had to design its education AI so that schools and administrators — not the company — decide how and where it is used. That marks a shift for Google, which, like most Silicon Valley firms, has traditionally built products to scale globally rather than bending to the preferences of individual institutions.

“We are not delivering a one-size-fits-all,” Phillips told TechCrunch. “It’s a very diverse environment around the world.”

Beyond governance, that diversity is also reshaping how Google thinks about AI-driven learning itself. The company is seeing faster adoption of multimodal learning in India, said Phillips, combining video, audio, and images alongside text — reflecting the need to reach students across different languages, learning styles, and levels of access, particularly in classrooms that are not built around text-heavy instruction.

Maintaining the teacher-student relationship

A related shift has been Google’s decision to design its AI for education around teachers, rather than students, as the primary point of control. The company has focused on tools that assist educators with planning, assessment, and classroom management, Phillips noted, rather than bypassing them with direct-to-student AI experiences.

“The teacher-student relationship is critical,” he said. “We’re here to help that grow and flourish, not replace it.”

In parts of India, AI in education is being introduced in classrooms that have never had one device per student or reliable internet access. Google is encountering schools where devices are shared, connectivity is inconsistent, or learning jumps directly from pen and paper to AI tools, Phillips said.

“Access is universally critical, but how and when it happens is very different,” he added, pointing to environments where schools rely on shared or teacher-led devices rather than one-to-one access.

Meanwhile, Google is translating its early learnings from India into deployments, including AI-powered JEE Main preparation through Gemini, a nationwide teacher training program covering 40,000 Kendriya Vidyalaya educators, and partnerships with government institutions on vocational and higher education, including India’s first AI-enabled state university.

For Google, India’s experience is serving as a preview of challenges likely to surface elsewhere as AI moves deeper into public education systems. The company expects issues around control, access, and localization — now obvious in India — to increasingly shape how AI in education scales globally.

From entertainment to learning as the top AI use case

Google’s push also reflects a broader shift in how people are using GenAI. Entertainment had dominated AI use cases last year, said Phillips, who added that learning has now emerged as one of the most common ways people engage with the technology, particularly among younger users. As students increasingly turn to AI for studying, exam preparation, and skill-building, education has become a more immediate — and consequential — arena for Google.

India’s complex education system is also drawing increasing attention from Google’s rivals. OpenAI has begun building a local leadership presence focused on education, hiring former Coursera APAC managing director Raghav Gupta as its India and APAC education head and launching a Learning Accelerator program last year. Microsoft, meanwhile, has expanded partnerships with Indian institutions, government bodies, and edtech players, including Physics Wallah, to support AI-based learning and teacher training, highlighting how education is becoming a key battleground as AI companies seek to embed their tools into public systems.

At the same time, India’s latest Economic Survey flags risks to students from uncritical AI use, including over-reliance on automated tools and potential impacts on learning outcomes. Citing studies by MIT and Microsoft, the survey noted that “dependence on AI for creative work and writing tasks is contributing to cognitive atrophy and a deterioration of critical thinking capabilities.” This serves as a reminder that the race to enter classrooms is unfolding amid growing concerns over how AI shapes learning itself.

Whether Google’s India playbook becomes a model for AI in education elsewhere remains an open question. However, as GenAI moves deeper into public education systems, the pressures now visible in India are likely to surface in other countries as well, making the lessons Google is learning there difficult for the industry to ignore.