Every evening in Hyderabad, eight-year-old Akshara performs a ritual that feels distinctly 2025. She takes her mother’s phone, opens ChatGPT, props it next to her notebook, and begins her homework. 

“What is 360 multiplied by 360?” she asks carefully into the device. The chatbot answers instantly. She copies it down, fills in the blank, and moves to the next question. Within minutes, the homework is done, and Akshara returns to what she really enjoys: learning dance routines on Youtube.

Soon, her after-school companion might follow her into the classroom. In October, the Central Board of Secondary Education (CBSE), India’s largest school board, announced plans to introduce “artificial intelligence” lessons for students as young as those in Class 3.

This, however, isn’t CBSE’s first flirtation with AI. The board has been at this since 2019, when—well before anyone had even heard of ChatGPT—it launched an AI elective for Class 9 and above with help from global tech giant Intel. In 2023, it added a 15-hour AI module for Class 6 onwards, which the education ministry says is now taught in more than 18,000 schools. Intel is still in charge of refreshing and updating the handbook it helped design back then.

The government now wants to integrate AI thinking into the curriculum of younger children, alongside their lessons in multiplication tables and grammar.

And the plan seems visionary on paper. To prepare tomorrow’s workforce by teaching them the language of algorithms early. But in reality, it’s a logistical and pedagogical headache. Most schools under CBSE—nearly 30,000 across India—are still struggling to find teachers comfortable with technology, let alone machine learning. 

“Senior teachers are hesitant. They are from a generation that didn’t grow up with these tools,” admitted Ameeta Mullawatal, chairperson for innovations and training at DLF Foundation Schools in Gurugram.

Then there is the question of what “learning AI” really means for an eight-year-old. CBSE officials insist that Class 3 students won’t be coding chatbots anytime soon; rather, they will be taught the building blocks of “computational thinking”—essentially, how to solve problems step by step, or what one might call “thinking like a computer”.

For a country still debating if screens actually help kids learn, CBSE has made up its mind.