'It's in the movies': Why AI is still sci-fi for people in the Indian subcontinent

Scroll through the news and India looks like an AI superpower in the making - enterprise adoption rates among the highest in the world, government AI summits, and billion-dollar data centre deals. But step outside the boardrooms and city offices, and for a huge share of people across the Indian subcontinent, AI is still something that exists mainly on a screen, in a Hollywood movie, a viral video, or a headline about ChatGPT, not something they have ever opened or used themselves.

The Numbers Behind The Gap

The disconnect shows up clearly in the data. Fewer than one in five rural residents across the Asia-Pacific region can perform even a basic digital task like a spreadsheet calculation, compared to roughly one in four in urban areas and AI naturally requires a layer of digital comfort above that. Around a quarter of the Asia-Pacific population remains offline entirely, with no realistic path to encountering AI tools in daily life.

Smartphones, But Not Equal Access

On paper, smartphone penetration looks promising, over 85% of Indian households now own at least one smartphone. But ownership doesn't mean equal access. Within those households, usage is often skewed heavily towards one or two members, typically men. Across South Asia, women remain up to 40% less likely than men to own a smartphone or have independent internet access - which means the household ‘having a smartphone’ often translates to almost no hands-on AI exposure for large numbers of women and older family members.

The Language Wall

Perhaps the biggest barrier isn't the device, it's the language on the screen. Most AI tools, from chatbots to voice assistants, are built first for English or a handful of major national languages. For the hundreds of millions across India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Nepal and Sri Lanka who are most comfortable in regional languages and dialects, that's an immediate wall. Education data reflects this too: in surveys of rural schools, none offered any AI-related curriculum, compared to over 40% of urban schools, meaning an entire generation in rural areas is growing up without even classroom exposure to how these tools work.

Two Different Countries, One AI Story

AI is an abstract concept for majority of people, something that exists in the same mental category as flying cars or robots that talk, impressive, a little unsettling, but fundamentally not part of daily life. Interestingly, surveys show young people in India and other emerging economies are actually more optimistic about AI than their counterparts in wealthier nations but that optimism is often based on what they've seen depicted online or in films, rather than direct experience.

Why Closing This Gap Matters

The risk is that AI becomes another technology that arrives in the subcontinent only for those who are already digitally privileged, urban, English-speaking, smartphone-owning, and male - while everyone else watches from the outside, the same way many experienced the early years of the internet and smartphones. Bridging that gap will require AI tools that work natively in regional languages, are designed for low-bandwidth and shared-device environments, and are introduced through schools and community programmes - not just enterprise dashboards. Until then, for a large share of people across the Indian subcontinent, AI will keep feeling exactly like what it currently is to them: something that only really exists in the movies.