India teaches Google how to scale AI in education

As artificial intelligence accelerates into classrooms around the world, Google has found that the hardest lessons on how to actually scale the technology are not coming from Silicon Valley, but from Indian schools.

India has become a proving ground for Google’s educational AI amid stiff competition from rivals, including OpenAI and Microsoft. With more than a billion Internet users, the country now represents the highest global use of Gemini for learning, according to Chris Phillips, Google’s vice president and general manager of education, within an education system made up of nationwide curriculum, strong government involvement, and unequal 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 to use AI tools in classrooms.

The size of India’s education system helps explain why the country has become such an important testing ground. The country’s school education system serves about 247 million students across nearly 1.47 million schools, according to the Indian government’s Economic Survey 2025-26, supported by 10.1 million teachers. Its higher education system is also among the largest in the world, with more than 43 million students enrolled in 2021-2022 – a 26.5% increase over 2014-2015, complicating efforts to introduce AI tools across vast, decentralized and unevenly resourced systems.

One of the clearest lessons Google learned was that AI in education cannot be rolled out as one centrally defined product. In India, where curriculum decisions are made at the state level and ministries play an active role, Phillips said Google should have designed its educational AI so that schools and officials — not the company — decide how and where it is used. This represents a shift for Google, which, like most Silicon Valley companies, has traditionally built products to scale globally rather than bow to the preferences of individual organizations.

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

Beyond governance, this diversity is also reshaping how Google thinks about AI-based learning itself. Phillips said the company is seeing faster adoption of multimedia learning in India, bringing video, audio and images together with text – reflecting the need to reach students across different languages, learning styles and access levels, especially in classrooms that do not rely on text-heavy instruction.

Maintaining the relationship between teacher and student

A related shift was Google’s decision to design its AI for education around teachers, not students, as the primary point of control. Phillips noted that the company has focused on tools that help teachers plan, evaluate, and manage classrooms, rather than bypassing them with direct AI experiences to students.

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

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

“Access is critical globally, but how and when it happens varies greatly,” he added, pointing to environments where schools rely on shared or teacher-led devices rather than individual access.

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

For Google, the India experience is a preview of challenges likely to surface elsewhere as AI moves deeper into public education systems. The company expects that issues around control, access and localization – which are now evident in India – will increasingly shape how AI in education is deployed globally.

From entertainment to learning as the best use case for AI

Google’s efforts also reflect a broader shift in how people use GenAI. Entertainment has dominated AI use cases in the past year, Phillips said, adding that learning is now one of the most popular ways people interact with technology, especially among younger users. As students increasingly turn to AI to study, prepare for exams, and build skills, education is becoming a more urgent and consequential arena for Google.

India’s complex education system is also attracting increasing attention from Google’s competitors. OpenAI has begun building a local leadership presence focused on education, hiring former Coursera APAC managing director Raghav Gupta as head of education for India and Asia Pacific and launching a learning accelerator program last year. Meanwhile, Microsoft has expanded its partnerships with Indian institutions, government agencies and edtech players, including Physics Wallah, to support AI-based learning and teacher training, highlighting how education has become a key battleground as AI companies seek to integrate their tools into public systems.

Meanwhile, the latest economic study in India points to risks to students from uncritical use of AI, including over-reliance on automated tools and potential impacts on learning outcomes. Citing studies conducted by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Microsoft, the survey indicated that “reliance on artificial intelligence for creative work and writing tasks contributes to cognitive atrophy and the deterioration of critical thinking abilities.” It serves as a reminder that the race to enter classrooms is unfolding amid growing concerns about how artificial intelligence will shape learning itself.

Whether Google Guide in India is 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 play out in other countries as well, making it difficult for the industry to ignore the lessons Google is learning there.