As AI races into classrooms worldwide, Google is discovering its toughest lessons on scaling education technology aren't coming from Silicon Valley - they're emerging from India's schools. The country now drives the highest global usage of Gemini for learning, forcing the tech giant to rethink everything from product design to deployment strategy. With 247 million students across 1.47 million schools and intense competition from OpenAI and Microsoft, India has become the proving ground where Google's education AI either adapts or fails.
Google just got schooled - literally. The company's Gemini AI is seeing its highest education usage globally in India, and the lessons emerging from that market are fundamentally reshaping how the tech giant thinks about AI in classrooms.
Chris Phillips, Google's vice president and general manager for education, revealed the India data this week on the sidelines of the company's AI for Learning Forum in New Delhi. He was meeting with K-12 administrators and education officials to understand how AI tools are actually being used in Indian classrooms - and what he's learning is forcing Google to abandon some deeply held Silicon Valley assumptions.
"We are not delivering a one-size-fits-all," Phillips told TechCrunch. "It's a very diverse environment around the world."
That diversity is putting pressure on Google in ways the company didn't anticipate. India's education system serves about 247 million students across nearly 1.47 million schools, supported by 10.1 million teachers, according to the Indian government's Economic Survey 2025-26. Higher education adds another 43 million students - a 26.5% jump since 2014-15. But scale isn't the challenge. It's that curriculum decisions sit at the state level, ministries play an active role, and access to devices and connectivity varies wildly from classroom to classroom.
