As AI races into classrooms around the world, Google has learned that the hardest lessons on how to actually scale the technology are emerging not from Silicon Valley, but from Indian schools.

India has become a proving ground for Google AI education amid intensifying competition from rivals, including OpenAI and Microsoft. With more than one billion internet usersthe country now accounts for the highest global use 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 unequal access to tools and connections.

Phillips spoke 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 test result. The country’s school education system serves about 247 million students in about 1.47 million schools, according to the Indian government. Economic Survey 2025-26supported by 10.1 million teachers. Its higher education system is also one of the largest in the world, with more than 43 million students enrolled in 2021–22 — a 26.5% increase from 2014–15 — complicates efforts to introduce AI tools to systems that are broad, decentralized, and unevenly resourced.

One of the clearest lessons for Google is that AI in education cannot be rolled out as a centrally defined product. In India, where curriculum decisions sit at the state level and ministries play an active role, Phillips said Google should design AI education 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 companies, has traditionally built products to scale globally rather than bow to the whims of individual institutions.

“We don’t deliver one size fits all,” Phillips told TechCrunch. “It’s a very diverse environment around the world.”

Beyond management, that diversity is also changing how Google thinks about AI-driven learning itself. The company has seen faster adoption of multimodal learning in India, Phillips said, which combines video, audio, and images with text — reflecting the need to reach students of different languages, learning styles, and access levels, especially in classrooms that aren’t built around text-heavy instruction.

Maintaining the teacher-student relationship

A related shift is Google’s decision to design its AI for education around teachers, rather than students, as the primary point of control. The company is focusing on tools that help teachers plan, assess, and manage the classroom, Phillips said, rather than bypassing them with student-directed AI experiences.

“The teacher-student relationship is critical,” he said. “We’re here to help that grow and develop, not replace it.”

In parts of India, AI in education is being introduced in classrooms without a single device per student or reliable internet access. Google has encountered schools where devices are shared, connectivity is inconsistent, or learning goes directly from pen and paper to AI tools, Phillips said.

“Access is critical to everything, but how and when it happens is very different,” he added, pointing to environments where schools rely on shared or teacher-led devices rather than one-on-one access.

Meanwhile, Google is translating early learnings from India into deployments, including AI-powered JEE Main preparation through Gemini, a nationwide teacher training program involving 40,000 Kendriya Vidyalaya teachers, and collaboration with government institutions of vocational and higher education, including India’s first AI-enabled state university.

For Google, India’s experience serves as a preview of the challenges likely to arise elsewhere as AI works its way deeper into public education systems. The company expects issues around control, access, and localization — now evident in India — to further shape how AI in education scales globally.

From entertainment to learning as the leading use case of AI

Google’s push also reflects a broader shift in how people use GenAI. Entertainment dominated AI use cases last year, said Phillips, who added that learning is now emerging as one of the most common ways people engage with technology, especially among younger users. As students increasingly turn to AI for studying, exam preparation, and skill development, education has become a more immediate — and consequential — arena for Google.

India’s complex education system is also drawing more attention from Google’s rivals. OpenAI has begun building a local leadership presence focused on education, hiring former Coursera APAC managing director Raghav Gupta as head of education in India and APAC and launch a Learning Accelerator program last year. Microsoft, on the other hand, has extended partnership with Indian institutions, government bodies, and edtech players, including Physics Wallahto support AI-based learning and teacher training, highlighting how education has become a key battleground as AI companies seek to embed their tools into public systems.

At the same time, India’s latest Economic Survey flagged risks to students from uncritical use of AI, including over-reliance on automated tools and potential impacts on learning outcomes. Citing studies by MIT and Microsoft, the survey says that “the reliance on AI for creative work and writing tasks contributes to cognitive atrophy and a deterioration of critical thinking capabilities.” It serves as a reminder that the race to enter classrooms continues amid growing concerns about how AI will shape learning itself.

Whether Google’s India playbook will become a model for AI in education elsewhere remains an open question. However, as GenAI works its way deeper into public education systems, the pressures seen today in India are likely to surface in other countries as well, making the lessons learned by Google hard for the industry to ignore.