New Delhi, Aug. 9 -- Yesterday, on the Vande Bharat Express from Mysuru to Bengaluru, I watched a fellow passenger-a young woman in her late twenties, working at a financial global capability centre (GCC) in the city-hunched over her laptop, feverishly using GPT-5 barely hours after its midnight release.

She told me she makes about Rs.1 lakh a month, yet spends $200 every month on her ChatGPT Pro subscription. Many of her colleagues, too, she added, are on different paid plans.

In a country where per-capita income hovers at around $2,700 a year, here was a professional willing to spend nearly 10% of her monthly salary on a single AI tool-not as a luxury, but as a competitive necessity.

Multiply that by the millions of Indians engaging ...