OpenAI says 18 to 24-year-olds account for nearly 50% of ChatGPT usage in India

OpenAI seems to have found the product-market fit with young Indians. The company said Friday that users between the ages of 18 and 24 accounted for nearly 50% of messages sent to ChatGPT in the country, and users under 30 accounted for 80%.

The AI ​​lab said Indians use ChatGPT mainly for work, with 35% of all messages related to professional tasks, compared to 30% globally.

The company’s coding assistant, Codex, is seeing particularly strong growth: OpenAI says Indians use Codex three times more than the global median, and weekly usage has increased four times since the tool got a Mac app two weeks ago. Users in India also ask three times as many coding-related questions as average.

This is consistent with findings from Antropic, which said earlier this week 45.2% of Claude’s tasks involve software-related use cases in India.

OpenAI said that outside of work tasks, 35% of messages to ChatGPT from Indians requested guidance, 20% were for general information questions and 20% were requests for the bot to produce or help with writing.

India is OpenAI’s second-largest market with more than 100 million weekly users, and the company has been actively trying to court Indians over its AI tools and services. The company offers sub-$5 subscriptions in the country, and even ran promotional campaigns last year to boost adoption.

“AI adoption is outpacing our ability to measure it – and that’s a challenge for anyone trying to make smart decisions. Signals are our way of bringing real-world evidence to the table so that India’s AI debate can be based on facts, not hype,” Ronnie Chatterji, chief economist of OpenAI, said in a statement.

OpenAI has had a busy few days in India, where a major AI Impact Summit is taking place 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 secure 100 megawatts of AI computing capacity and distribute ChatGPT Enterprise across Tata’s IT services subsidiary TCS.

The AI ​​lab has signed agreements with fintech Pine Labs, travel platforms Ixigo and Makemytrip, and food and grocery delivery company Eternal. It is also working with educational institutions to distribute its tools to more than 100,000 students over the next six years.