Google used its I/O Connect India 2026 developer conference to lay out a broad slate of AI initiatives touching education, healthcare, language access and enterprise cloud infrastructure in the country. The announcements span a free AI training curriculum for students, a Gemini-powered assistant for school labs, expanded healthcare partnerships with AIIMS, wider Indian language support for Gemini Live, and new data localisation options for enterprises. Google framed the moves as part of its commitment to India's AI ecosystem, though the announcements largely extend existing partnerships and pilot programmes rather than introducing entirely new products.
DeepMind brings its research training programme to India
Google DeepMind is rolling out its AI Research Foundations curriculum in India, a free 56-hour programme aimed at students and AI developers. The curriculum covers AI research methods, machine learning and large language models, and participants who complete it receive Google Cloud Skill badges and certificates. Google said the programme has drawn more than 38,000 learners globally, though it did not specify how many are based in India.
The Indian Institute of Science, Bengaluru has begun incorporating the curriculum into its academic programmes, and NASSCOM will make it available through its Future Skills Prime platform. The rollout is being supported through the Google.org AI Opportunity Fund for the Asia-Pacific region, with the network AVPN working alongside local partners to deliver the training.
ATL Saathi - Gemini-powered assistant heads to school innovation labs
Google is expanding its existing collaboration with the Atal Innovation Mission through a new tool called ATL Saathi, a desktop web application built to help teachers run Atal Tinkering Labs. The Gemini-powered assistant is designed to help teachers plan lessons, design classroom activities and select experiments for students. Google said ATL Saathi will launch in 100 schools this year, with a longer-term goal of reaching the roughly 10,000 schools that currently host Atal Tinkering Labs. That target implies the initial rollout covers a small fraction of the eventual base, and Google did not offer a timeline for scaling beyond the first 100 schools.
AIIMS expands use of MedGemma for local health conditions
The All India Institute of Medical Sciences is broadening its use of Google's open source MedGemma models to build AI tools for India-specific health conditions. Having already deployed MedGemma-based applications for dermatology and outpatient triaging, AIIMS researchers are now developing models aimed at leprosy detection and sexual and reproductive health, working with both medical images and text inputs. Google said AIIMS intends to make these localised clinical models available to India's developer community, though further details on access and timelines were not disclosed.
Separately, Google noted that its open models are being used in government health infrastructure. The National Health Authority has used Gemma 4 and Google's open sourced Medical Data Toolkit in building Aarogya Setu 2.0, the successor to India's pandemic-era health record application.
Gemini Live adds more than 25 Indian languages
Google's conversational AI platform Gemini Live now supports voice and text interaction in more than 25 Indian languages and dialects, including Sanskrit, Bhojpuri and Maithili. The expansion draws on Project Vaani, a research collaboration with IISc Bengaluru that has now open sourced speech and image datasets covering 109 Indic languages. Google positioned the language expansion as central to making its AI tools accessible beyond English speaking users, though it did not detail accuracy benchmarks or performance across the newly added languages.
Enterprise push centres on data residency
Google also announced new AI deployment options aimed at enterprises and government bodies operating under data residency requirements. Indian organisations can now run Gemini on Google Distributed Cloud from within Indian data centres, keeping prompts, model outputs and workloads within their own environment. Google described the setup as targeted at regulated sectors including banking, healthcare, telecommunications and government, where compliance obligations around data governance are significant.
Alongside this, Google will make Gemini 3.5 Flash available to Indian enterprises and startups through the Gemini Enterprise Agent Platform and the Gemini Enterprise application, with commitments to process data within the country.
Announcements build on existing partnerships rather than new bets
Taken together, Google's India-specific announcements at I/O Connect largely deepen partnerships already in motion, its DeepMind training curriculum, the AIIMS collaboration, and Project Vaani, rather than introducing new AI products for the Indian market. The company positioned the announcements as part of a broader push to align its AI investments with practical adoption in education, healthcare and public infrastructure, at a time when competition among global technology companies for presence in India's AI ecosystem has intensified.
