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 the world.”
Beyond governance, that diversity is also reshaping how Google thinks about AI-driven learning itself. The company is seeing faster adoption of multimodal learning in India, said Phillips, combining video, audio, and images alongside text — reflecting the need to reach students across different languages, learning styles, and levels of access, particularly in classrooms that are not built around text-heavy instruction.
Maintaining the teacher-student relationship
A related shift has been Google’s decision to design its AI for education around teachers, rather than students, as the primary point of control. The company has focused on tools that assist educators with planning, assessment, and classroom management, Phillips noted, rather than bypassing them with direct-to-student AI experiences.
“The teacher-student relationship is critical,” he said. “We’re here to help that grow and flourish, not replace it.”
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