It was a Monday morning in March when Naga Tummala took a call that’d kickstart a chain of events in the Indian education space that not many saw coming.

On the other end of the call was a representative from OpenAI. The ChatGPT maker had been scouting for a school partner in India for nearly a year.

And Arise, the private-school network that Tummala co-founded in 2016, fit the bill. The network has over 1,800 schools—including the likes of Pathways, Jaipuria Schools, and Delhi Public Schools—with about 1.5 million students in the K–12 category across India.

The move makes sense. After all, India has the second-largest number of ChatGPT users, next only to the US. The company is gearing up to open its first office in the country, and has already announcedTech CrunchOpenAI launches a sub-$5 ChatGPT plan in India a cheaper version of its product.

But schools aren’t convinced yet. For one, the data hunger of AI platforms is hard to ignore. For the likes of OpenAI, insights into user behaviour are more valuable than revenue.

“We also share feedback from schools and teachers, which contributes to developing better AI tools,” said KV Praveen Raju, head of Hyderabad-based Suchitra Academy International School, part of the Arise network.

That kind of feedback is precious for OpenAI. But for schools, complying with the requirements—signing non-disclosures to run pilots, seeking permissions from parents, and avoiding the policy axe, where a wrong move could cost up to Rs 250 crore in penalties—is daunting.

Yet, the company is pushing through. After all, education is a critical use case for ChatGPT. More than one-tenth of all user interactions on the chatbot revolved around tutoring or teaching, according to a September report the company published with Harvard and Duke universities.

OpenAI has also tied up with the Indian education ministry and the AICTE, the country’s highest regulator for engineering courses, to provideTimes of IndiaOpenAI announces Learning Accelerator program in India: 5 lakh ChatGPT licences for Indian students and educators over 500,000 free ChatGPT licences.