As AI races into classrooms worldwide, Google is finding that the toughest lessons on how the tech can actually scale are emerging not from Silicon Valley, but from India’s schools.
India has become a proving ground for Google’s education AI amid intensifying competition from rivals, including OpenAI and Microsoft. With more than a billion internet users, the country now accounts for the highest global usage of Gemini for learning, according to Chris Phillips, Google’s vice president and general manager for education, within an education system shaped by state-level curricula, strong government involvement, and uneven 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 AI tools are being used in classrooms.
The scale of India’s education system helps explain why the country has become such a consequential testing ground. The country’s school education system serves about 247 million students across nearly 1.47 million schools, per the Indian government’s Economic Survey 2025-26, supported by 10.1 million teachers. Its higher education system is among the world’s largest as well, with more than 43 million students enrolled in 2021-22 — a 26.5% increase from 2014-15 — complicating efforts to introduce AI tools across systems that are vast, decentralized, and unevenly resourced.
One of the clearest lessons for Google has been that AI in education cannot be rolled out as a single, centrally defined product. In India, where curriculum decisions sit at the state level and ministries play an active role, Phillips said Google has had to design its education AI so that schools and administrators — not the company — decide how and where it is used. That marks a shift for Google, which, like most Silicon Valley firms, has traditionally built products to scale globally rather than bending to the preferences of individual institutions.
“We are not delivering a one-size-fits-all,” Phillips told TechCrunch. “It’s a very diverse environment around t …