OpenAI seems to have found a product market that suits young Indians. The company said on Friday that users between the ages of 18 and 24 account for nearly 50% of messages sent on ChatGPT in the country, and users under the age of 30 account for 80%.
The AI lab said Indians use ChatGPT mostly for work, with 35% of all messages related to professional 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 median, 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.
This is in line with findings from Anthropic, which reported earlier this week that 45.2% of Cloud tasks relate to software-related use cases in India.
OpenAI said that outside of work tasks, 35% of ChatGPT messages from Indians asked for directions, 20% were questions about general information, and 20% were requests for the bot to create or help with typing.
India is OpenAI’s second largest market with more than 100 million weekly users, and the company is actively trying to court Indians for its AI tools and services. The company offers a sub-$5 subscription tier in the country and even launched promotional campaigns last year to spur 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. Signals are our way of presenting real-world evidence, so India’s AI debate can be based on facts, not hype,” OpenAI Chief Economist Ronnie Chatterji said in a statement.
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OpenAI has had a busy few days in India, which is hosting the main AI Impact Summit in New Delhi this week. The company is opening new offices in Mumbai and Bengaluru this year and has signed a major partnership with conglomerate Tata Group to provide 100 megawatts of AI computing capacity and distribute ChatGPT Enterprise under 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.