Digital
OpenAI partners with IIT, IIM, Aiims in AI education drive
From IIT to AIIMS, six institutions bring AI into everyday learning
NEW DELHI: OpenAI has teamed up with six of India’s leading higher education institutions to weave artificial intelligence into the fabric of campus life, aiming to build a generation of graduates ready for an AI-first economy.
The first cohort spans management, medicine, engineering, creative disciplines and multidisciplinary education. It includes the Indian Institute of Technology Delhi, Indian Institute of Management Ahmedabad, All India Institute of Medical Sciences New Delhi, Manipal Academy of Higher Education, University of Petroleum and Energy Studies and Pearl Academy.
The initiative is designed to go beyond basic access to AI tools. Instead, it focuses on helping students, faculty and staff use AI to deepen learning, sharpen critical thinking and accelerate research, all within responsible-use and academic-integrity frameworks.
OpenAI India head of education Raghav Gupta, said the shift is essential as workplaces evolve. He noted that nearly 40 per cent of core skills are expected to change by 2030, largely driven by AI. “Education institutions are a critical route to bridge the gap between what AI tools can do and how people are actually using them,” he said.
Over the coming year, the collaboration is expected to support more than 100,000 students, faculty members and staff. The programme will introduce campus-wide chatgpt edu access, structured onboarding, discipline-specific guidance and responsible-use policies tailored to each institution.
AI skills will be embedded into everyday academic workflows, from advanced prompting and coding to analytics, simulations, case studies and research support. The initiative will also bring hackathons, build days and research-to-deployment projects, culminating in industry days that connect campus innovations with startups and enterprises.
IIM Ahmedabad and Manipal Academy of Higher Education will also roll out OpenAI certifications, creating structured AI learning pathways in business and multidisciplinary programmes.
Beyond university campuses, OpenAI is collaborating with edtech platforms Physics Wallah, upGrad and HCL guvi to launch structured courses on AI fundamentals and practical ChatGPT use cases. The aim is to extend AI fluency to students and early-career professionals across the country.
Across the six institutions, the focus areas vary. IIT Delhi will concentrate on engineering research, prototyping and industry-linked innovation. IIM Ahmedabad will embed AI across management disciplines, from strategy and finance to entrepreneurship and public policy.
At Aiims New Delhi, the collaboration will explore AI-driven medical education, including simulation, clinical documentation and evidence synthesis, while setting safety and quality benchmarks. Manipal Academy will focus on cross-disciplinary research and large-scale AI literacy across programmes.
UPES plans to integrate AI across engineering, business, law, design and health sciences, positioning it as a core academic and operational tool. Pearl Academy will apply AI to creative workflows, from fashion and branding to digital media, giving students practical exposure to AI-driven design.
Taken together, the initiative signals a broader shift in Indian higher education from simply offering AI access to building institutions that think, teach and create with it at their core.
Digital
The creative cull: how AI is coming for the marketers, ad men and researchers
Robots aren’t taking over yet, but the writing may already be on the wall for some of the US’ most glamorous white-collar jobs.
CALIFORNIA: The robots are not, it turns out, storming the factory floor. They are sitting quietly at a MacBook in a Soho agency, rewriting your copy, summarising your focus groups and generating your mood boards, and nobody has been sacked. Yet.
A new report from Anthropic, the AI company behind the Claude chatbot, offers the most rigorous look to date at what artificial intelligence is actually doing to jobs, as opposed to what doomsayers and boosters claim it might. The verdict from economists Maxim Massenkoff and Peter McCrory is nuanced but pointed: there is no mass unemployment so far, but some sectors have good reason to be nervous. Marketing, market research and the arts are squarely in the crosshairs.
The researchers introduce a new measure called “observed exposure.” It goes beyond theoretical speculation about what AI could do and instead tracks what it is already doing, drawing on real Claude usage data. The approach is clever. They weight automated uses, where the machine performs the job entirely, more heavily than augmentative ones, where it merely assists. They then map this onto roughly 800 occupations, weighted by how much time workers actually spend on each task. For now the target user base has been the US market, but the findings offer a glimpse of what may be happening in other countries as well.
The results are sobering for the creative and analytical classes. Market research analysts and marketing specialists clock in at 64.8 per cent observed exposure, meaning nearly two-thirds of their daily tasks are already being performed, at least in part, by AI in professional settings. The leading automated task is preparing reports, illustrating data graphically and translating complex findings into written text. In other words, this is the kind of work junior analysts spend most of their days doing.
Arts and media fare little better. The sector shows meaningful theoretical exposure, as large language models can in principle handle the lion’s share of tasks, though observed usage still lags behind capability. The gap is narrowing, however, and the direction of travel is unambiguous.
Here is the sting in the tail. The workers most exposed to AI disruption are not, as popular mythology suggests, low-paid drudges. They are older, better educated, more likely to be women and considerably better paid, earning 47 per cent more per hour on average than their least-exposed counterparts. Graduate degree holders are nearly four times as prevalent in the high-exposure group. The creative professional, the senior analyst and the market researcher with an MBA are precisely the people who should be paying attention.
“We’re not talking about the checkout operator,” the paper implies. “We’re talking about the account planner.”
The most alarming signal in the data concerns not those already in jobs, but those trying to enter them. Among workers aged 22 to 25, hiring into highly exposed occupations has slowed measurably since the release of ChatGPT in late 2022. There has been a 14 per cent drop in the job-finding rate, a figure the authors describe as “just barely statistically significant.” Young people are, in effect, finding the door to exposed professions quietly closing. Whether they are staying in education, taking different jobs or simply giving up is not yet clear.
For a bright graduate eyeing a career in market research or media production, this is not merely an academic data point. It is a flashing amber light.
The paper is careful about what it does not find. Unemployment among highly exposed workers has not risen in any statistically meaningful way since the ChatGPT era began. The apocalypse has not arrived. Even in the Computer and Math category, the most theoretically exposed of all, Claude currently covers just 33 per cent of tasks in practice. The gap between what AI can do and what it actually does at scale in professional workflows remains vast.
Think of it less like a tsunami, the authors suggest, and more like a slowly rising tide. The internet did not destroy journalism overnight. It took 20 years and the collapse of a generation of classified advertising revenue. The China trade shock also took decades to fully register in unemployment statistics, and economists are still debating the numbers.
What does this mean for the luvvies, the admen and the pollsters? The honest answer is: not much yet, but watch this space. AI is already doing the grunt work, including data summaries, draft press releases and boilerplate creative briefs. The question is whether it stops there or continues climbing the value chain.
The authors are building a framework to track exactly that and promise to update it as new data arrives. If the tide does come in, they want to see it coming before the sandcastles are already gone.
For now, the creative industries can breathe, but perhaps not too deeply. The machine is not at the door. It is already at the desk.
