New Delhi: India has become the world's largest market for large-scale language model (LLM) deployments, due to increased usage of platforms such as ChatGPT, Gemini, and Perplexity, according to a report by Bofa Securities.
The brokerage described India as an “ideal testbed” for agent AI applications built on LLMs that can reason, plan and execute tasks independently.
However, the report also points out the potential impact on the country's startup ecosystem.
According to Bofa Securities, ChatGPT downloads peaked in July at more than 24 million downloads, but declined slightly after OpenAI introduced free subscriptions, peaking at around 24 million downloads. Perplexity, on the other hand, saw downloads peak at over 20 million in October, helped by Airtel's bundled offering.
According to the report, ChatGPT currently leads the LLM market in India with around 145 million monthly active users, followed by Google's Gemini with 105 million.
Every day, around 65 million users access OpenAI-powered ChatGPT in India, and Gemini records an average of around 15 million users per day.
India accounts for more than 16 percent of ChatGPT's global user base, making it the platform's largest market, the report said.
The country is also the largest market for competing platforms. According to Bofa Securities, India accounts for 30% of Google Gemini's average monthly users and 38% of Perplexity's average monthly users.
Free subscription to LLM applications offered by domestic carriers has been cited as one of the main factors driving adoption.
Other factors include India's base of more than 700 million mobile users, access to low-cost data plans that can consume more than 20 GB of data for around $2 per month, and a young English-speaking population.
The report describes large-scale implementation as a “win-win” for consumers and global LLM providers. Many applications are available in regional languages, allowing consumers to benefit from increased productivity, improved learning outcomes, and reduced language barriers.
Global LLM providers will have access to large and diverse datasets that can be used to train and refine models, including improving responses to multilingual and culturally sensitive queries.
This trend is also stated to be positive for carriers. Bofa Securities said companies in highly competitive sectors could increase their average revenue per user, create future upsell opportunities through targeted services, and explore collaboration opportunities with global companies in the data center space.
Regarding the potential impact on domestic startups, the report warned that global LLMs could establish dominance before local models mature or scale, similar to the dominance of Meta and Google through platforms such as Facebook and YouTube.
It further added that the network effects enjoyed by global LLMs could put them in a stronger position than Indian startups to meet local consumer demand through agent AI wrappers.
