Since mid-2025, premium AI assistants have been free for many Indian users through Airtel, Jio and OpenAI offers, and Shiprocket launched an AI suite for MSME sellers at ₹499 a month. For many firms cost is no longer the main barrier; the question is which narrow, repetitive tasks to hand over.
Use them for the repetitive, high-volume work that eats your week and needs little judgement: first replies to routine enquiries, drafts of quotes and letters from your own templates, product listings and translations, and copying data from bills and forms into a spreadsheet. Keep people on prices, promises and anything a customer will hold you to. That division of labour matters more than which tool you pick, because for many firms cost has stopped being the main obstacle.
Between July and November 2025, Airtel (with Perplexity), Jio (with Google) and OpenAI made paid AI assistants free for a year or more for many users in India, and Shiprocket launched an AI suite for MSME sellers with unlimited use at ₹499 a month. What has not changed is the need to pick a narrow task, check the output and keep customer data safe. Here is what changed, what the government is doing, and a 30-day way to start.
- ChatGPT Go for 12 months for users in India from 4 November 2025; the plan launched at ₹399 a month
- ₹0
- ChatGPT Go for 12 months for users in India from 4 November 2025; the plan launched at ₹399 a month
- Google's approximate value for 18 months of Google AI Pro offered free to eligible Jio users
- ₹35,100
- Google's approximate value for 18 months of Google AI Pro offered free to eligible Jio users
- A month for unlimited use of Shiprocket's Shunya.ai for MSME sellers, at launch
- ₹499
- A month for unlimited use of Shiprocket's Shunya.ai for MSME sellers, at launch
- SME Growth Fund for equity support, proposed in the Union Budget 2026-27
- ₹10,000 crore
- SME Growth Fund for equity support, proposed in the Union Budget 2026-27
01
The price of a capable assistant fell to zero
Three offers changed the economics in the second half of 2025. On 17 July, Airtel began offering all its customers 12 months of Perplexity Pro, a subscription Airtel priced at ₹17,000 a year. On 30 October, Google and Reliance announced 18 months of Google AI Pro at no extra cost for Jio Unlimited 5G users, starting with those aged 18 to 25, with access to Gemini 2.5 Pro (then Google's most capable model), NotebookLM and 2 TB of storage. From 4 November, OpenAI made ChatGPT Go, launched in India in August at ₹399 a month, free for 12 months for users in India.
The motive is not charity. As MediaNama's founder Nikhil Pahwa put it when the Airtel deal was announced, internet businesses "scale first, monetise later". For a small business that means two things: the tools are worth trying now, and every free period is a trial with an end date. These are also personal subscriptions, so be careful what you paste into them.
02
Tools built for Indian sellers and Indian languages
Alongside the general assistants, tools aimed squarely at MSMEs have appeared. In July 2025 Shiprocket launched Shunya.ai inside its seller platform, offering multilingual catalogue listings, ad content, customer-support chatbots and delivery optimisation, with unlimited use at ₹499 a month. MediaNama put questions to the company about training data and data protection compliance and had no reply when it published, a useful reminder to read the terms before uploading customer lists to any tool.
Indian-language capability is improving as well. At the India AI Impact Summit in February 2026, Sarvam AI showed speech recognition, text-to-speech and document reading for Indian languages, Gnani.ai showed multilingual voice AI for customer support, and Jio previewed a tool to generate ads for creators and small businesses, though it was still in development. Before trusting any of them with customers, test them on your own real questions, in Malayalam as well as English.
While Shunya AI can help small businesses compete better, it won't completely level the playing field.
03
What the government is doing, and why it is cautious
The Union Budget 2026-27, presented on 1 February, proposed a dedicated ₹10,000 crore SME Growth Fund to provide equity support and "create future Champions" among small firms, plus a ₹2,000 crore top-up of the Self-Reliant India Fund for micro enterprises. The IndiaAI Mission, with an outlay of ₹10,371.92 crore over five years, has onboarded more than 38,000 GPUs that startups, MSMEs, researchers and students can use at subsidised rates. Yet the government's answer in the Rajya Sabha on 13 February 2026 listed just 47 startups and MSMEs, plus 36 early-stage startups, among the users, and showed about ₹401 crore received by the mission as of 9 February 2026. For most small firms, the more immediate change is the price of everyday tools.
The official tone is measured. The Economic Survey 2025-26 proposed an AI Economic Council to "calibrate the pace of AI adoption within the country", and said every major AI deployment should show "a credible pathway to net social and economic benefit", in jobs, productivity or the quality of public services. That is a sensible test inside a small business too: if you cannot say what a tool will save or improve, you are not ready to roll it out.
04
Where AI pays for itself in a small business
The pattern that works is narrow: pick a task with high volume and low judgement, give the AI your own approved material, and have a person approve anything that commits the business. Our guide on when automation is worth it has a simple test; these are the usual starting points.
| Task | Why it suits AI | Keep a human on |
|---|---|---|
| First replies to routine enquiries | Same questions daily, answers already written | Anything outside your approved answers |
| Quotes, letters and proposals | Fixed structure, changing details | Prices, discounts and delivery dates |
| Product listings and translations | Repetitive writing in several languages | Claims about quality, origin or health |
| Bills and forms into a spreadsheet | Tedious copying between systems | Totals and tax figures before filing |
| Social posts, emails and ad drafts | Many variants needed quickly | What gets published under your name |
To connect these steps without writing code, see our no-code automation stack. If you are weighing a new hire against a tool, our framework on hiring versus automating helps.
05
Three risks to manage
Confident mistakes. AI drafts can be fluent and wrong. Anything customer-facing needs approved source material, permission to say it does not know, and a quick handover to a person. Our piece on chatbot guardrails covers the design.
The end of free. The Jio offer runs for 18 months and the ChatGPT Go and Airtel offers for 12. Note the dates, and before building a routine around a tool, check what it will cost when the offer lapses.
06
A 30-day plan to start
A month is enough to learn whether one task is worth handing over. Work through it in this order:
- Choose one task: the one that takes the most staff hours and needs the least judgement.
- Time it for a week before changing anything, so you have a baseline to compare against.
- Write the source material: approved answers, price list, templates and tone, in English and Malayalam if your customers use both.
- Run AI drafts with a human check for two weeks, and log every error and correction.
- Use business accounts with admin controls for anything involving customer data.
- Measure hours returned and errors, then keep, expand or stop. Do not add a second task until the first is stable.
- Diary the end dates of any free plans you rely on, with the price you will pay afterwards.
If you would like help choosing and costing that first task, our AI and automation team starts with an audit of where the hours actually go.
Sources
Facts current as of 19 June 2026. Offers and prices change often, so check each provider's current terms.