India, Oct. 10 -- Anyone who has sat through a college seminar week in India knows the scene. A second-year BCom student stands at the front, clicker in hand, and reads slide after slide of dense text pulled from a textbook PDF, the font shrinking as the paragraphs get longer, while the faculty member in the back row marks internal assessment scores on a printed sheet. The student made those slides on a phone, probably the night before, probably after the topic was dropped on the class WhatsApp group with a two-day deadline.

That scene is changing, slowly and unevenly. In the last couple of years, AI tools that can draft a slide deck from a prompt have moved from novelty to something students quietly use in hostel rooms and teachers use ...