Picture this: Shaig Abduragimov, a solutions engineer at OpenAI, flying from London to New Delhi to present a product he has been building. As he speaks, a South Delhi school principal is frantically taking notes.

This was OpenAI’s formal entry into India’s edtech sector. The AI giant, which is preparing to open its New Delhi office, invited leading institutions, universities, edtech startup founders, and well-known educators such as Anand Kumar of Super 30 to a small gathering in the capital.

The event, titled “Education Summit, India” showed off OpenAI’s plans for products and the leadership for the Indian education vertical.

At the event, Leah Belsky, OpenAI’s Vice-President of Education, announced that former Coursera managing director Raghav Gupta will lead the company’s education strategy for India and the wider Asia-Pacific region.

Primarily, the company is aiming to partner with schools and colleges to offer a copilot-like experience for students and teachers.

So why is OpenAI pushing into Indian classrooms, and what kind of revenue potential does it see?

OpenAI’s Edtech Endgame

According to Pragya Misra, OpenAI’s head of policy and partnerships in India, the aim is not financial. “The aim is not to make revenue,” Misra told Inc42. “The company just wants to enable education in India and is not looking for revenue opportunities.”

There is some credibility to this given OpenAI’s complex corporate structure. The organisation is formally a non-profit, but it controls a for-profit Public Benefit Corporation (PBC) responsible for raising capital and developing AI models. The latter is bound to pursue the non-profit’s mission and is subject to capped profits.

Yet the commercial reality is harder to ignore. Microsoft, OpenAI’s largest investor, holds exclusive rights to resell OpenAI’s APIs through its Azure cloud platform. While OpenAI develops AI and promotes its societal benefits, Microsoft actively sells the tools to customers worldwide, and will continue to do so.

Belsky noted that a large share of early users testing OpenAI’s Study Mode came from India, and that their feedback had........

© Inc42