1. Headline & intro
Google’s grand plan for AI in education is no longer being scripted in Mountain View, but in overcrowded, under‑resourced Indian classrooms. That shift matters far beyond South Asia. What Google is learning in India — about scaling AI in messy, politically sensitive, low‑infrastructure school systems — is a preview of the battles Europe is about to fight under the EU AI Act and tight education budgets.
In this piece, we’ll unpack what’s actually happening in India, why Google is quietly pivoting its education strategy, how this reshapes the competitive landscape with Microsoft and OpenAI, and what lessons European policymakers and edtech founders should steal now instead of reacting later.
2. The news in brief
According to TechCrunch, India has become Google’s most important testing ground for Gemini in education. Citing Google’s education lead Chris Phillips, the piece reports that India now represents the largest global usage of Gemini for learning.
India’s school system serves roughly 247 million students in about 1.47 million schools, supported by over 10 million teachers, TechCrunch notes, referencing India’s Economic Survey. Higher education adds more than 43 million students. This sheer scale, combined with state‑level curricula, strong government oversight and uneven connectivity, is forcing Google to abandon a single global product model.
Instead, Google is letting schools and administrators decide how AI tools are used, focusing on teacher‑facing features like lesson planning and assessment support. The company is also adapting to multimodal learning (video, audio, images plus text) and shared‑device environments. TechCrunch reports that India is now a core reference case for how Google expects AI in education to roll out worldwide.
3. Why this matters
The most important shift is strategic: Google is being dragged from a consumer‑grade, one‑size‑fits‑all mindset into building configurable, institution‑centric AI infrastructure. That is exactly the kind of architecture public systems in Europe will demand.
Who benefits?
- Google gains a live stress test at national scale, in conditions that look more like the global average than a 1:1‑iPad private school in California. If Gemini can work with shared devices, spotty networks and multiple languages, it becomes much harder for rivals to displace.
- Governments benefit from a big tech vendor finally recognising that policy, curricula and teacher workflows are not optional add‑ons. Designing AI around teachers as the primary control point makes adoption politically sellable.
- Teachers, in theory, gain a co‑pilot instead of a competitor: tools that offload bureaucracy (marking, paperwork, differentiation of materials) rather than attempt to replace classroom interaction.
Who loses?
- Direct‑to‑student edtech startups face a harder road into public systems. If the winning pattern is “teacher‑mediated AI”, then unregulated chatbots aimed at pupils from their phones will increasingly be framed as a risk, not an innovation.
- Big tech firms that insist on global templates will hit a wall when facing ministries that now know they can ask for localisation, governance controls and alignment with national pedagogical goals.
At a deeper level, India is forcing Google to confront the real bottlenecks for AI in education: governance, infrastructure and trust — not algorithms. That’s exactly the trifecta Europe is encoding into law.
4. The bigger picture
India’s story slots into three wider trends in AI and education.
1. Education is becoming AI’s killer non‑entertainment use case.
Google says that learning has overtaken pure entertainment as a major use of generative AI, particularly among younger users. That aligns with what we’re seeing from competitors: OpenAI pitching ChatGPT as a study partner and Microsoft weaving Copilot into Office tools that dominate schools and universities. Whoever owns the “learning layer” of AI will shape how an entire generation thinks, writes and reasons.
2. The market is shifting from apps to infrastructure.
Early AI edtech focused on fancy chatbots and adaptive quiz apps. India is pushing Google to build boring but essential layers: identity, access control by teachers and school admins, content alignment with official curricula, offline‑friendly delivery and audit trails. This looks less like Duolingo and more like core infrastructure — which is exactly where hyperscalers are strongest.
3. Public systems are waking up to cognitive risks.
TechCrunch notes that India’s own Economic Survey is already warning about over‑reliance on AI and potential damage to critical thinking. European debates about “calculator brain” are resurfacing, but with AI that can write essays, code and even solve creative tasks. This will push regulators toward demanding evidence of learning outcomes, not just engagement metrics, from vendors.
Historically, we’ve been here before: interactive whiteboards, tablets, MOOCs — all promised to “revolutionise” classrooms, then got absorbed as just another layer of tools. The difference this time is that AI can actually reshape cognitive processes and assessment systems at scale. India is the first huge system trying to steer that power rather than simply consume it.
5. The European angle
Europe should read the Indian experiment as a mirror rather than a distant case study.
Structurally, the similarities are striking:
- Decentralised control: Like India’s state‑level curricula, Europe’s education is fragmented — German Länder, Spanish autonomous communities, French central control but strong unions, and so on. Any serious AI rollout must be customisable at the level where pedagogy is decided.
- Regulatory gravity: The EU AI Act classifies many educational AI systems as high‑risk, demanding human oversight, transparency and rigorous risk management. India’s emerging debates about control and cognitive impact anticipate exactly the questions EU regulators will enforce in law.
- Infrastructure gaps: Away from northern European capitals, classrooms still juggle shared devices, ageing PCs and unstable networks that look a lot more like Indian government schools than Silicon Valley campuses.
European players — from Google and Microsoft’s local subsidiaries to smaller edtech firms in Berlin, Ljubljana, Barcelona or Zagreb — will have to adopt the India pattern: teacher‑centric, multimodal, offline‑tolerant, and deeply aligned with local curricula and languages.
There is also a sovereignty question. If Google refines its education AI playbook in India first, then sells that “pre‑tested model” into European ministries, the risk is that policy follows product rather than the other way around. European institutions should be watching India not just to learn, but to decide where they want a different path — for example, by favouring open‑source models, public cloud infrastructure or domestic vendors in sensitive use cases.
6. Looking ahead
Over the next 24–36 months, expect three developments.
1. Teacher‑first AI will become the default narrative.
Politically, it is the only safe message: “We empower teachers” instead of “We replace teachers.” Vendors will race to release planning, assessment and differentiation tools embedded in existing workflows like Google Classroom, Microsoft 365, or national school platforms. Expect unions and parent groups in Europe to scrutinise how much control teachers actually have in practice.
2. Procurement will become the real battleground.
India’s national‑level programmes — such as large‑scale teacher training and partnerships with public universities — are a dress rehearsal for competitive tender wars in Europe. Ministries and regions will start issuing tenders that bake in AI capabilities as requirements for learning management systems and digital textbooks. Vendors that can show success at India‑scale will have an edge.
3. Outcome data will decide who stays.
As concerns about cognitive atrophy grow, ministries will ask a simple question: Do students actually learn better with AI? India’s experiments will generate early evidence on exam performance, dropout rates and teacher workload. Expect European policymakers to lean heavily on that data — selectively — to justify their own strategies.
The biggest open questions remain unresolved: How much autonomy should students have with AI tools? Who owns the interaction data — the platform, the school, or the state? And how do we prevent a generation that can prompt brilliantly but struggles to think without a model on the other side of the screen?
7. The bottom line
India is forcing Google to rebuild its education AI from the ground up: localised, teacher‑centric, multimodal and resilient to weak infrastructure. That is not a side project; it’s a template for how AI will enter public classrooms everywhere, including Europe. The real choice for European educators and regulators is whether to buy that template wholesale or co‑create their own — ideally before the procurement contracts are signed and the defaults harden. What kind of AI‑mediated schooling do we actually want?
