OpenAI seems to have found application in the product market with young Indians. The company said on Friday that users between the ages of 18 and 24 accounted for nearly 50% of messages sent on ChatGPT in the country, and users under 30 accounted for 80%.
The AI lab said Indians use ChatGPT mostly for work, with 35% of all messages related to business tasks, compared to 30% globally.
In particular, the company’s coding assistant, Codex, is seeing strong traction: OpenAI said Indians use Codex three times more than the global average, and weekly usage has quadrupled since the tool got a Mac app two weeks ago. Users in India also ask three times as many coding-related questions as the median.
That’s consistent with findings from Anthropic, which it said earlier this week 45.2% of Claude’s work is mapped to software-related use cases in India.
OpenAI said outside of work tasks, 35% of messages on ChatGPT from Indians asked for guidance, 20% were questions about general information and 20% were requests for the bot to produce or help write.
India is OpenAI’s second largest market with more than 100 million weekly users, and the company is actively trying to attract Indians for its AI tools and services. The company offers a subscription level of under $5 in the country and last year even ran ad campaigns to boost adoption.
“The adoption of AI is moving faster than our ability to measure it – and that’s a challenge for anyone trying to make smart decisions. Tokens are our way of bringing real-world evidence to the table, so India’s AI conversation can be based on facts rather than hype,” said OpenAI Chief Economist Ronnie Chatterji.
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OpenAI has had a busy few days in India, which is hosting a major AI Impact Summit in New Delhi this week. The company is opening new offices in Mumbai and Bangalore this year and has signed a major partnership with the Tata Group to secure 100 megawatts worth of AI computing capacity and distribute ChatGPT Enterprise to Tata’s IT services subsidiary TCS.
The AI lab has signed deals with fintech Pine Labs, travel platforms Ixigo and MakeMyTrip, and food and grocery delivery company Eternal. It has also partnered with educational institutions to distribute its tools to more than 100,000 students over the next six years.
