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

OpenAI appears to have found strong product-market fit among young Indians. The company said on Friday that users aged 18 to 24 account for nearly 50% of messages sent to ChatGPT in India, while users under 30 make up 80% of overall usage in the country.

OpenAI also said Indians primarily use ChatGPT for work-related purposes. According to the company, 35% of messages from India are tied to professional tasks, compared with 30% globally.

OpenAI highlighted particularly strong traction for its coding assistant, Codex. The company said Indians use Codex three times more than the global median, and that weekly usage has grown fourfold since Codex received a Mac app two weeks ago. OpenAI added that users in India also ask three times as many coding-related questions compared with the median.

The trend aligns with findings from Anthropic, which said earlier this week that 45.2% of Claude’s tasks in India map to software-related use cases.

Outside of work, OpenAI said 35% of ChatGPT messages from Indians are requests for guidance, 20% are questions about general information, and another 20% are requests for writing help or content generation.

India is OpenAI’s second-largest market with more than 100 million weekly users, and the company has been actively working to attract more users in the country. It offers a subscription tier priced below $5 in India and has run promotional campaigns to boost adoption.

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

OpenAI has had an especially active week in India, as the country hosts a major AI Impact Summit in New Delhi. The company said it will open new offices in Mumbai and Bengaluru this year and has signed a major partnership with the Tata Group to secure 100 megawatts of AI compute capacity. OpenAI also said the Tata partnership includes distributing ChatGPT Enterprise within Tata’s IT services subsidiary, TCS.

The AI lab has also signed agreements with fintech Pine Labs, travel platforms Ixigo and MakeMyTrip, and food and grocery delivery company Eternal. In addition, OpenAI said it has partnered with educational institutions to distribute its tools to more than 100,000 students over the next six years.