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4 weeks ago
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ARTICLE AD BOX
Summary
Data shows that India’s chatbot market is fairly well contested, with ChatGPT rivals Gemini and Perplexity especially favoured. The industry’s cost dynamics also argue against a winner-takes-all outcome. But none of this rules out the eventual rise of a monopoly.
It’s a reasonable hope that no single platform comes to dominate India’s adoption of AI chatbots. Social media saw free services join forces with network effects to place all major formats under the control of X and Meta’s three popular platforms. November data from a report by Bank of America Securities suggests that we might escape that fate in the AI chatbot space.
Though telecom bundles may be shaping some usage choices, Indian users seem disproportionately drawn to bots other than ChatGPT, run by market leader OpenAI. India accounts for 16% of ChatGPT’s global base of monthly active users, placed at 850-900 million, but 31% of Google-run Gemini’s 300-350 million and 38% of Perplexity’s 50 million.
There’s another reason to hope this market won’t go the “winner-takes-all” way. Unlike most platforms, chatbots bear significant variable costs, as each response to a query guzzles electricity. This results in service pricing, constrains the urge to go gangbusters and means an edge on power bills could reshape chatbot rivalry.
But then, the payoff of global domination seems so profound that spectacular sums of money are being thrown at it. A monopoly may still arise.
English (US) ·