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AI adoption in India remains highly concentrated in a handful of cities, with the advanced use of these AI tools even more unevenly spread across the country, according to a new study by OpenAI on Wednesday, April 15.
Nearly 50 per cent of all ChatGPT users in India are located in the top 10 cities, which make up just 10 per cent of the country’s total population. Notably, the highest number of ChatGPT users are located in the Delhi-NCR region, OpenAI said in its first-ever report analysing the AI ‘Capability Gap’ in the country.
While India ranks among the world’s most advanced AI markets, particularly in coding, data analysis, and complex reasoning, the adoption of OpenAI’s tools is three times more concentrated in top Indian cities than in comparable countries such as the US, UK, Brazil, and Germany, as per the report.
According to OpenAI, these findings highlight “a significant opportunity to expand access beyond early adopters in the top few cities.” The capability gap or capability overhang of AI was first referenced in OpenAI chief Fidji Simo’s ambitious 2026 roadmap for ChatGPT. It is loosely defined as the gap between present-day frontier AI models and everyday use of AI tools.
“AI models are capable of far more than how most people experience them day to day, and 2026 is about closing that gap. The leader in AI will be the company that turns frontier research into products that are undeniably useful for people, businesses, and developers,” Simo wrote in a Substack post on January 5, 2026.
This appears to be the first instance of OpenAI disclosing a state-wise analysis of ChatGPT usage in India, which has over 100 million weekly active users, making it one of the company’s largest markets. OpenAI’s findings further demonstrate that despite promises of AI as an equaliser, adoption of the technology is not evenly distributed geographically, specifically within a country.
The disparity in AI adoption across regions is not limited to ChatGPT alone. A report by Anthropic earlier this year found that “Claude is used more intensely in high-income countries, within the US in places with more knowledge workers, and for a relatively small set of specialised tasks and occupations.”
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“The central question now is how quickly the benefits of AI can extend beyond early adopters and leading cities to the wider population. Closing this gap will require expanding access, building skills, and enabling more meaningful use across the country, an effort shaped in large part by India’s young, fast-adopting population,” Oliver Jay, Managing Director (International), OpenAI, said in a press release.
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Last year, leading AI companies such as Google, OpenAI, and Perplexity raced to offer long-term, free access to premium AI services to millions of users in India. Despite these efforts, studies such as the OpenAI report indicate that AI adoption remains concentrated in specific user segments and regions. To address the capability gap in India’s AI usage, OpenAI said it will depend on factors such as language, affordability, and infrastructure.
-Reasoning tokens per user: OpenAI said India ranks among the top five nations globally in thinking capability usage per person. This metric is based on the use of the reasoning tokens – specialised system tokens used by specific AI models to perform step-by-step reasoning – among ChatGPT Plus subscribers.
-Code-generation via Codex: The use of Codex, OpenAI’s AI coding assistant, grew 4x in India in just two weeks after the launch of our Codex app in February 2026, suggesting the advanced use of OpenAI’s tools for generating code, data analysis, etc. However, OpenAI said that Codex usage shows a 9x gap across regions in India, with advanced use of the coding tool clustered in a few urban hubs, including Bengaluru, Hyderabad, Delhi, and Chennai.
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-ChatGPT in education: India’s eastern states such as Assam, Odisha, Manipur, Tripura, and Chhattisgarh show stronger engagement than other parts of the country when it comes to using ChatGPT for education and learning purposes, as per the report. “In Assam, 22 per cent of all messages [to ChatGPT] relate to education and learning, around 20 per cent higher than the national average,” it said.
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-ChatGPT in healthcare: Regions such as Jammu and Kashmir, Punjab, Chandigarh, Himachal Pradesh, and Kerala demonstrate higher engagement for health and wellness-related queries to ChatGPT, with nearly 1 in 10 messages sent to ChatGPT from users in Jammu and Kashmir related to health, about 32 per cent higher than the national average.
As part of its push for broader and inclusive AI adoption in India, OpenAI highlighted its recent efforts such as organising regular Codex-centric education and engagement events with local partners and collaborations with companies such as TCS to scale AI-native software development. The AI startup recently announced a partnership with fintech firm Razorpay to enable developers to build and monetize their products directly through Codex.
OpenAI also has various partnerships with Indian universities to promote the use of its ChatGPT Edu product among students in the country.
