Over the last few months, Big AI has made big moves in India. First it was Aravind Srinivas’s Perplexity, which partnered with India’s second largest mobile network Airtel to offer their premium Pro version for free in India. They gave away a subscription priced around Rs 17,000 annually. That was in July. It set the ball rolling for more such deals.
The country’s largest mobile network, Jio, partnered with Sundar Pichai’s Google to offer for free 18 months of Gemini Pro — on paper worth around Rs 35,000 — to users aged between 18 and 25 years. That was just as November dawned. Just days later, OpenAI, the company that started the generative AI revolution three years ago, offered one of their premium plans to users in India for free. As of now, the clock on the Airtel Perplexity deal will run out in a year, as it will in the OpenAI deal, with Jio-Gemini doing one better with their free offer of premium AI for 18 months. OpenAI users will be charged per usual once the free year is over.
Judging by the language in the press releases that announced these deals, the positioning is clear — it is a win-win-win for everyone. The big talk is of “democratising AI access and strengthening the digital foundation of India”. Ask tech watchers and they will tell you that this has played out before. It is the clasic bait and switch. First hook the users and then start charging once they can’t do without a higher quality of chatbot. Simply put, these companies are trying to get folks who are lured by the shimmer of free, and lock them into their ecosystem. Even so, there is a larger question. Will it work?
“I don’t think there are enough people who crave a high level of output. Right now, a lot of AI usage is rudimentary for normal people,” says Santosh Desai, CEO of Futurebrands and an observer of consumer behaviour. Desai agrees that these AI firms are trying to induce demand and to get more people “addicted to a higher dose”. He, however, adds that trying to stimulate demand is a function of the breakneck pace of growth of AI on the supply side. “When everything is developing at such a high pace as things in AI are, you don’t have the patience to let people graduate over a period of time,” he says.
CATCH ‘EM EARLY
It is, in a manner of speaking, similar to what quick commerce companies did, by first introducing consumers to the convenience of 10-minute delivery, and then making it the norm for them. It is also similar to how Jio disrupted the market with free data for months after launch, getting folks hooked to data, and then starting to monetise it. The difference, however, is that there is a clear payoff for the user in quick delivery as well as in faster, cheaper data. The payoff for the AI app user is less well-defined, especially since there is easy access to free versions that don’t offer that big a downgrade for casual users.
The Big AI has a clear marketing challenge in convincing most of the population to upgrade. So here’s the big question: Is premium AI as much of a game changer for normal folk? Doubtful, at best. There is a deeper reason why Big AI wants to woo more Indians. After all, even for Big Tech, the country is more lucrative in user volume than in pure-play monetisation. Just how much deeper does free premium AI go from being just a marketing strategy?
Much of India’s lure for these companies lies in the richness of its data. And by triggering higher usage, there is much to be gained, especially in training their large language models with even higher amounts of highly detailed data. This is an opportunity to build on the data of the single largest swathe of population in the world available to them.
China, the other large market, is difficult to crack owing to its geofencing of technology. India’s mass AI opportunity is one that will be anchored in local languages. Large language models could do significant work in local languages with a deeper understanding of cultural and linguistic nuances. They can monetise it at a later stage, once AI usage matures. This brings us to the criticism that offering a service for free can be interpreted as predatory pricing and, therefore, anticompetitive, as it makes it difficult for rivals to challenge incumbents.
Ramanjit Singh Chima, Asia Pacific policy director and senior inter national counsel at Access Now, says these deals should be looked at from an antitrust lens as well. “It (offering products for free) is a long-standing tradition in the tech sector, but one that is coming under increased scrutiny from governments. Big AI is trying to take a leaf out of Big Tech’s playbook to lock in their dominant position. It took two decades for regulators to react to Big Tech and start taking action,” says Chima.
LACK OF LOCAL PLATFORMS
In that context, a key issue in India is the lack of locally developed platforms and models. While the government and the broader society talk about the dangers of techno-imperialism, for the moment there is nothing that is locally developed that can hold a candle to platforms from the West and from China. With Big AI in a hurry to establish and widen its moat, more deeply engaged users for them would make things even more difficult for Indian efforts at developing an indigenous product of note in generative AI.
The country would be staring at the same problem it had for the last 20 years — lack of local options. India’s Google is Google. India’s Facebook is Facebook. India’s WhatsApp is WhatsApp. It is difficult to challenge tech companies that have established a clear early-mover advantage and leveraged network effects.
Ask Arattai, which just a few weeks ago, was being touted as India’s answer to WhatsApp. It has seen its download numbers wither away as it didn’t offer a compelling enough case for people to move away from the default choice, WhatsApp, despite support from the government. Things may have been different if there were more locally developed, high-quality competition to WhatsApp in its early days. That is what is lacking in AI as well. And Big AI knows it.
