AI companies seem to have decided that giving away their products for free is the best way to get them into the hands of consumers in India.
A day after Google had announced that it was giving away its Gemini Pro plan to all students in India for free for a year, Perplexity seems to have tied up with a similar plan for all Airtel customers. All Airtel customers will now get access to Perplexity Pro for a year for free. The subscription is worth Rs. 17,000 otherwise.
“This partnership is an exciting way to make accurate, trustworthy, and professional-grade Al accessible to more people in India—whether a student, working professional, or managing a household,” said Perplexity CEO Aravind Srinivas. “With Perplexity Pro, users get a smarter, easier way to find information, learn, and get more done,” he added.
Google and Perplexity seem to know what they’re doing by giving away their Pro plans to large numbers of Indian users for free — both companies have Indian CEOs, and seem to understand the Indian audience. At the moment, there are several AI companies on the market with models of roughly similar capability. Google and Perplexity want to get their products into the hands of users as quickly as possible to create a habit — they’d hope that even once the free 12-month trial is over, a small fraction of these users might end up being lifelong customers, which could create a userbase for these companies in the long run.
On the face of it, Google’s Pro plan seems to be better structured than Perplexity’s Pro offering. Perplexity is anyway available for free for all users, and the Pro plan just gives them access to more queries. Google’s Pro plan, however, comes with new features like video generation through Veo3 which aren’t available in its free plan. But regardless, having access to these AI systems for free is something that should spur the adoption of AI in India, even in segments that might not necessarily be early adopters of new technology.