Young adults send nearly half of India’s ChatGPT messages, OpenAI says

OpenAI said users between 18 and 24 years of age account for nearly 50% of all messages sent by Indians to ChatGPT, and users under 30 accounted for 80% of usage in the country. The company’s figures point to a striking concentration of AI engagement among young adults in India that could reshape how students learn, employers recruit, and digital services are designed.

The statistics refer specifically to message volume rather than head-count of users, meaning India’s youngest adult cohort is sending a disproportionate share of queries and prompts. That pattern contrasts with some third-party audience estimates that measure share of total users rather than message traffic: a SimilarWeb summary reported that 18–34-year-olds make up roughly 53% of ChatGPT’s global user base, with the 18–24 slice alone at about 23.3%. Those figures reflect different metrics and geographies and should not be conflated.

OpenAI’s broader research on student adoption in the United States offers a complementary portrait. The company reported that “Over one-third of 18- to 24-year-olds in the US use ChatGPT,” and that “over one-quarter of their messages are about learning, tutoring, and school work.” OpenAI said its analysis drew on ChatGPT user data for January 2025 and a third-party survey of college and graduate students carried out between December 13, 2024, and January 2, 2025. The report text includes both a 1,229 respondents figure and a rounded “1,200 students” tally when summarizing use cases such as starting papers (49%) and summarizing long texts (48%).

Leah Belsky, vice president of education at OpenAI, emphasized the implications for schooling: “Students are major users of AI. They are using it informally. They are learning about it from their friends. It is time for us to bring AI out of the shadows and make it part of the core infrastructure of U.S. education so that students can be prepared for the future workforce.” Her comment frames the uptake as both an opportunity to modernize instruction and a call for policymakers and institutions to respond.

The India numbers arrive as OpenAI and competitors expand commercial offerings. The company’s consumer and enterprise revenue has surged in the past two years, and new product tiers have been introduced to meet demand for research-grade access and heavier usage. Whether youth-heavy engagement in India translates into long-term market growth, new education tools, or workplace skill shifts depends in part on how access and digital literacy evolve across regions and age groups.

Researchers and education officials caution that high youth usage does not automatically mean equitable benefit. OpenAI’s own U.S. data show significant variation in adoption by state, suggesting geography and local policy shape access. For India, the company’s message-share statistics raise immediate questions about what students and young professionals are using ChatGPT to do, how institutions will adapt, and how regulators will respond to rapid, concentrated adoption of generative AI among a country’s youngest adults.

OpenAI provided the usage figures and the survey results cited in its analysis; methodological notes in the company’s materials list January 2025 user data and the December 2024–January 2025 student survey window. Further details on the India dataset and on how ages were assigned to messages were not included in the materials released with the figures.