India is presently the battleground for AI and the industry’s biggest stalwarts are gearing up to draw you in their camp. The idea is simple – get you used to AI and then encourage you to subscribe to monthly AI plans, integrating these advanced bots and agents to make your life a tad easier. Google, OpenAI, and Perplexity have gone aggressive with their strategies, drawing from Reliance Jio’s idea of giving a free trial to users.
This intense competition, however, is raising serious concerns among policy experts and domestic industry advocates regarding India’s long-term tech sovereignty.
Major US AI companies, including Meta AI and xAI Grok, are leveraging India’s vast linguistic diversity and a large price-sensitive user base as a vital testing ground as well as a key source for training the next generation of large language models (LLMs). A market like India provides the kind of variety that could help AI expand its capabilities, especially with regard to multilingual multimodal exchanges.
AI battlegrounds: Freebies are the chosen weapons
Let’s start with OpenAI, an AI firm that has had a vast presence in the country, especially among the young crowd. OpenAI had initially launched ChatGPT Go as the most affordable subscription in India, priced at Rs 399 per month. In a bid to battle the free offers from Perplexity and Google, OpenAI is now offering a year’s subscription to ChatGPT Go for free.
Compared to the free model, the paid version offers higher limits for AI prompts, both for text and image generation. You miss out on access to the Sora video generator but for everything else, this model serves right, especially for the student category.
How Perplexity and Google’s free offers work
It was Perplexity that started the game in India by collaborating with Bharti Airtel to extend an annual subscription to Perplexity Pro for free to all Airtel subscribers. The free access, which Airtel costs Rs 17,000 a year, offers the following benefits:
– Access to advanced AI models such as GPT-4.1, Claude, Gemini and Sonar, depending on your need. This gives you more control and better answers for complex or specialised tasks.
– Much higher / virtually unlimited “Pro Searches”. This is good if you use the tool a lot for research, study, and work, and don’t want to hit limits.
– You can upload documents (PDFs, CSVs, etc.), images, etc., and get AI-powered analysis, summaries, and insights.
– If you do creative work presentations, design, content creation, the Pro susbcription works.
– There are tools/features (called Labs in Perplexity) where you can build dashboards, spreadsheets, mini-apps, etc., powered by AI.
– Pro users often get priority support and extra allowances (e.g., upload quotas).
The Jio-Google offers the most compelling option
Reliance Jio also wanted to jump in on the AI bandwagon in a bid increase the number of subscribers. Partnering with Google, Jio offers free access to Google AI Pro for its AI freebies. As part of the benefits, the Jio-Google deal offers:
– Eligible Jio users will receive 18 months of free access to Google’s “AI Pro” plan (also marketed as the “Gemini Pro” bundle). Jio says the offer is valued at approximately ₹35,100 per user.
– You get access to Google’s most capable model, Gemini 2.5 Pro, via the Gemini app.
– Increased limits for image and video generation using models like Nano Banana and Veo 3.1.
– 2 TB of cloud storage across Google services (Photos, Drive, Gmail, WhatsApp backups on Android) for the duration of the offer.
– Expanded/trained access to tools like Notebook LM for research/learning and AI integration into Google Workspace apps (Docs, Gmail, etc.).
– The initial rollout is for Jio users aged 18-25 on unlimited 5G plans of Rs 349 or above (both prepaid & postpaid).
