Although there always appears to be hype and buzz around AI on social media, it seems that India is still in the early days of its adoption.
Over 60 per cent of Indians are not familiar with AI and only 31 per cent have tried any generative AI tool, according to a recent study jointly published by Google and market research firm Kantar India.
The findings of the study are based on a survey of 8,000 Indians from tier 1 and tier 2 cities between the ages of 18 and 44. They were revealed at Google’s first-ever Gemini Day in India, where it showcased live demonstrations of several, newly unveiled Gemini features including its Veo 2 text-to-video generator, Gemini Live with Video, Gemini Canvas, Deep Research, and Audio Overviews.
“Gemini Live already works in nine Indian languages. Under the covers, my team has been hard at work at making it understand over a 100 Indian languages. In fact, we’ve been developing benchmarks that we’ve been sharing with the community. And our benchmarks show that it is the best model bar none, when it comes to the whole range of something like 29 Indian languages,” Manish Gupta, Senior Director, Google Deepmind, said at the event held in New Delhi on Friday, April 25.
He added that the long context window of Gemini 2.5 has been a key advancement. “Gemini 2.5 also has advanced coding capabilities […] It can process an entire series of novels, two-hour long videos, or large code repositories and still keep track of details that are buried in that long-form content,” Gupta said.
“Our focus with Gemini has always been to harness Google’s leading innovation to build a truly personal, helpful AI assistant for everyone, and we’re glad to see that come alive in so many meaningful ways across ages, cities, needs, and languages,” Shekar Khosla, vice president, marketing, Google India, said.
‘Massive headroom for AI adoption in India’
The Google-Kantar study is based on face-to-face interviews with survey respondents comprising males and females from two socioeconomic classes of households.
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While Phase 1 focused on measuring the awareness and adoption incidence of AI tools among a total of 5,133 respondents, Phase 2 dealt with the impact of Gemini in addressing the struggles of 3,415 respondents. It appears that the study was conducted before the full rollout of the Gemini 2.5 models.
Over 93 per cent of Gemini users surveyed reported a boost in productivity upon using the AI models. Another 95 per cent of the users said it helped spark their creativity, as per the study.
“Furthermore, 80 per cent report Gemini has helped with complex decision-making or expert guidance, 69 per cent say it supported their skill development and learning journey, and 77 per cent found it helped them pursue a new creative or professional pursuit,” the report read.
While the study did not mention the number of Gemini users in India, it was publicly reported recently that the AI chatbot app’s users have grown rapidly to 350 million globally.
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However, Gemini still trails behind OpenAI’s ChatGPT, which saw monthly traffic of an estimated 600 MAUs in March this year, as well as Meta AI which has an estimated MAU count of around 500 million.