Indian tutors sell $6-$30 AI classes in WhatsApp groups, skipping pricey edtech

Every evening Keshev Dutt, a 28-year-old in Jalandhar far from India's tech hubs, teaches small business owners in Bangladesh and Nepal to use AI in Excel: automating inventory logs, generating invoices, analyzing sales patterns, building customer databases. For $30 per head he runs a three-month program of twice-weekly 60-to-90-minute sessions in WhatsApp and Facebook groups and on Zoom. Since starting in March 2025 he has trained about 50 people, he told Rest of World, and many sign up for additional modules.

Bisma Wani in Srinagar charges 500-800 rupees ($6-$10) per group session for freelancers seeking remote work on Fiverr and Upwork, teaching ChatGPT, Canva, Adobe Express AI and Midjourney, prompt engineering and automation workflows; she gets 10-15 new inquiries a week. Formal AI courses cost several hundred dollars, out of reach for her students, while India's edtech market is worth about $7.5 billion and forecast to reach $29 billion by 2030. Unlike registered platforms, the tutors work through closed groups where word of mouth drives enrollment.

Bengaluru AI researcher Anirudh Govind told Rest of World the informal tutorials fill a critical gap: 'These low-cost tutors are making AI less intimidating and more practical. It suggests that AI adoption in developing economies is happening bottom-up, not top-down.' The lessons convert to income: Nepali freelance designer Aditi Thapa went from earning $70 to $250 a month after Wani's modules, and Dhaka stationery shop owner Farid Ahmed automated his inventory with AI spreadsheet tools after three weeks of Dutt's classes. The sector remains unregulated, Govind cautions.

Formal AI courses and academies cost several hundred dollars, beyond the budgets of small shop owners and freelance workers across South Asia.

Closed WhatsApp and Facebook groups make enrollment a referral between people who already trust each other, so tutors spend nothing on marketing.

Stripping AI education down to what a small business actually needs - spreadsheets, invoices, product photos - produces visible results in weeks, not semesters.

Where formal education is priced out of reach, the winning distribution channel is the closed group people already trust - expertise packaged small beats platforms packaged big.

As of December 2025 Rest of World described a booming informal economy spreading from Jalandhar to students and business owners in South Asia, Africa and the Middle East, still unregulated. Free formal alternatives are scaling in parallel - the government's Yuva AI for All foundation course and a Microsoft-backed initiative aiming to equip 20 million workers with AI skills by 2030 - but Dutt is confident the personalized low-cost layer keeps its role: 'They teach advanced AI. I teach someone how to take a ledger-based shop and run it with spreadsheets with AI.'