According to TechCrunch, Google’s VP for Education, Chris Phillips, revealed that India now accounts for the highest global usage of Gemini for learning. He made the comments at Google’s AI for Learning Forum in New Delhi this week, where the company is gathering feedback from school administrators and officials. The scale is staggering: India’s school system serves about 247 million students across 1.47 million schools, supported by 10.1 million teachers, with a higher education system of over 43 million students. Google’s key lesson is that AI cannot be a single, centrally-defined product here, forcing a shift from its traditional global scaling playbook. The company is now designing tools where schools and administrators, not Google, decide how AI is used, and is focusing on teachers as the primary point of control, not students.
India: The Ultimate Stress Test
Here’s the thing: Silicon Valley loves to talk about “scale,” but India is showing Google what that word really means in the messy, real world of public education. We’re not talking about a few well-funded school districts with 1:1 iPad programs. This is a system where, as Phillips noted, you have classrooms jumping directly from pen and paper to AI tools, with shared devices and spotty connectivity. That’s a completely different design challenge. It forces you to think about multimodal learning—mixing video, audio, and images—not because it’s cool, but because it’s necessary to reach students across different languages and literacy levels. If you can make your AI education tools work here, you can probably make them work anywhere. It’s the ultimate stress test for product-market fit.
The Big Strategic Shift: Teacher-First, Not Student-First
This might be the most important tactical change coming out of this experiment. Google is explicitly designing its education AI around teachers as the primary point of control. That’s huge. It’s a direct response to the reality of India’s (and frankly, most of the world’s) education governance, where state ministries are deeply involved. But it’s also smart business and good optics. By building tools for lesson planning, assessment, and classroom management, Google is positioning itself as an aid to the system, not a disruptive bypass. Saying “we’re here to help the teacher-student relationship grow, not replace it” is the perfect message when regulators and parents are anxious about AI. It’s a defensive move against the very concerns about cognitive atrophy and over-reliance that India’s own Economic Survey just flagged.
The Global Education Battleground
So why is Google going through all this trouble? Because education has suddenly become a top GenAI use case, especially for younger users, and it’s a battleground where you have to plant your flag early in public systems. And Google isn’t alone in seeing India as the key proving ground. OpenAI has hired Raghav Gupta to lead its education push in India and APAC and launched a Learning Accelerator program. Meanwhile, Microsoft is expanding partnerships with Indian edtech giants like Physics Wallah. They’re all fighting for the mindshare of a billion-plus internet users. The prize isn’t just a slice of the edtech market; it’s embedding your AI model into the foundational learning experiences of a generation.
Can Google’s Playbook Export?
The big question is whether the “India playbook” becomes a global model. I think the principles will. The issues of local control, radical localization, and hybrid access models aren’t unique to India. They’ll surface anywhere AI tries to integrate into a national or state-level curriculum. Google’s bet is that by learning to be flexible and institution-friendly in the world’s most complex environment, it builds a muscle memory that works everywhere. It’s a shift from being a product company to being a platform-and-partnership company in this sector. The real test will be if this teacher-centric, administratively-compliant approach can still create AI tools that feel magical and transformative to the actual student in the classroom. Get that balance right, and the lessons learned from India’s 1.47 million schools could define the next decade of AI in education everywhere else.
