OpenAI and Perplexity have turned to the Indian market 

ChatGPT and Perplexity are making moves in the Indian market to leverage the Asian country’s massive population for the expansion of their user base. 

The world’s largest artificial intelligence companies are aiming to harness India’s massive population to expand their chatbot user base. ChatGPT and Perplexity are two examples of AI giants that have launched initiatives targeting the most populous nation in the world with a tech-savvy market. 

ChatGPT has turned to the Indian market 

OpenAI’s ChatGPT and the AI search engine Perplexity have both launched plans and products specific to the Indian market in recent months. 

In August, OpenAI rolled out an “India Plan” priced at ₹399, which is about $4.50 per month, a small fraction of its standard subscription rates elsewhere. At the same time, the company announced the opening of its first office in the country of 1.4 billion people. 

Nick Turley, the head of ChatGPT, stated that the company’s decision was driven by India’s large user base. “We have to be selective on which markets we go to understand deeply, with the hope that we learn things that can translate elsewhere,” Turley said.

OpenAI also introduced accessibility features designed for rural India, including support for a dozen Indian languages and adaptations for low-bandwidth environments. According to Turley, these efforts aim to increase reach and provide valuable training data that can be replicated in other emerging markets.

According to the digital research firm Sensor Tower, Indians spent 1.13 trillion hours on apps in 2024, leading the world in app usage. However, despite their activity, Indian consumers spent less than $1 billion on apps in the same year, placing the country outside the global top 20 markets for revenue.

Despite the low revenue, AI firms continue to take an interest in India due to the significant number of users. “The volumes make India a market which cannot be ignored,” said Mahesh Makhija, the technology consulting leader at EY in India. 

Large AI platforms also stand to gain a significant amount of insight from training on India’s vast and varied data sets. 

Sensor Tower data shows that AI app downloads in India have surged more than 500% so far in 2025 compared with the same period last year. ChatGPT is the most downloaded AI app this year, with 125 million installs. It outranks Perplexity’s 26 million installs and Google’s Gemini’s 23 million installs by more than quadruple. 

Turley said India has already become ChatGPT’s second-largest market and is expected soon to overtake all others. 

“It’s an absolutely incredible market for us,” he said.

AI giants target first-mover advantage

Perplexity, which was founded by Aravind Srinivas, has also made an effort to break into the Indian market. The company offered its $200 annual Pro service for free to subscribers of Airtel, the country’s second-largest telecom provider, as reported by Cryptopolitan in July. 

Srinivas said the decision was motivated by the cultural curiosity of Indian users. 

“Indians are among the most curious people on the planet,” he said. 

India is already Meta’s largest market for AI-enabled services. The company has one billion users across WhatsApp, Instagram, and Facebook. Google also powers about 95% of smartphones in the country, which gives its Gemini AI a significant advantage with a built-in user base.

Government-backed ventures like Sarvam AI are working on domestic large language models, but they have yet to release products that can compete with ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity, or China’s DeepSeek.

Observers suggest that the Indian government is intentionally delaying heavy-handed regulation to give domestic firms the space to innovate. 

“Our ecosystem is very nascent, and the players we have are all mostly start-ups, young entrepreneurs,” Jibu Elias, AI researcher and governance specialist, said. “The government has made it very clear that it wants to have a pro-innovation ecosystem, and jumping into regulation early on will give these big guys an unfair advantage.”

India currently lacks strong domestic challengers, which makes it convenient for global firms to gain a first-mover advantage to capture India’s next generation of AI users. Elias stated that once users adopt a particular tool and its usage becomes habitual, they are less likely to switch.

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