CALIFORNIA: India is not just adopting OpenAI’s Codex. It is devouring it. Weekly active users of the AI coding tool have grown 27 times since January, while daily interactions were up more than 20 times by late April, the company revealed on Thursday on the sidelines of Mumbai Tech Week.
The numbers place India firmly among the top five countries globally for Codex adoption and the top ten for engagement, cementing its status as one of OpenAI’s most consequential markets.
What makes the India story particularly striking is what people are actually doing with the tool. More than a quarter of Codex requests in the country are for non-coding tasks. Indians are using it to synthesise information, draft documents, automate research and organise workflows, turning a product originally built for developers into something closer to a general-purpose work engine.
This is not entirely new. OpenAI data from February already showed that Codex use for coding tasks in India ran at roughly three times the global average, with coding-related questions nearly three times the global median. The latest figures suggest that lead is widening, and the user base is broadening well beyond software engineers.
“Codex may have started as a coding product, but increasingly people are using it to move from intent to execution across almost all aspects of work,” said Thomas Jeng, head of startups for Asia-Pacific at OpenAI. “India already has one of the world’s strongest builder cultures, and the pace of adoption here reflects how actively people are building with leading-edge AI tools.”
Enterprise India is moving in the same direction. OpenAI has already announced Codex collaborations with TCS, Infosys and Razorpay, spanning software engineering and broader enterprise workflows.
For OpenAI, India is no longer just a large addressable market. It is fast becoming the world’s most revealing stress test for what AI can do when an entire country decides to run with it.
