India has become a proving ground for Google’s education AI amid intensifying competition from rivals, including OpenAI and Microsoft. One of the clearest lessons for Google has been that AI in education cannot be rolled out as a single, centrally defined product. Google is encountering schools where devices are shared, connectivity is inconsistent, or learning jumps directly from pen and paper to AI tools, Phillips said. The company expects issues around control, access, and localization — now obvious in India — to increasingly shape how AI in education scales globally. Whether Google’s India playbook becomes a model for AI in education elsewhere remains an open question.