‘We are making creativity accessible to everyone with minimal friction’: Adobe exec on free Express Premium access for Airtel users in India

The paid subscription of Adobe Express, dubbed Express Premium, costs around Rs 4,000. However, Adobe is offering the plan free nationwide for one year through a partnership with Airtel. Airtel has roughly 350 million subscribers in India. The Express Premium subscription can be activated via the Airtel Thanks app, with no credit card required.

Adobe isn’t the first tech company to partner with a major telecom provider in India to offer its AI tools free to consumers. OpenAI, Google, and Perplexity are also offering premium AI subscriptions valued at thousands of rupees. OpenAI, the company behind ChatGPT, is offering a full year of ChatGPT Go at no cost, a plan that typically costs Rs 399 per month.

“We view this as making creativity accessible to everyone with minimal friction,” Govind Balakrishnan, Senior Vice President, Express Product Group & Digital Media Services, Adobe, told indianexpress.com in an interview on the sidelines of the announcement.  (Image: Adobe)

Google, in partnership with Jio, is providing 18 months of Gemini Pro access to users, along with 2TB of cloud storage. Meanwhile, Perplexity is offering free access to Perplexity Pro for Airtel customers, while Google is also offering college students a free one-year AI Pro plan with 2TB of storage.

Smart business move

Artificial intelligence companies are racing to expand in India and build a market for their AI tools. After all, the country has some of the highest smartphone and internet penetration rates in the world, with over 700 million smartphone users. Experts say that by offering AI tools free to millions of Indians through telecom providers, tech companies can not only generate interest in artificial intelligence among the general public and help users become accustomed to these tools, but also influence enterprise behaviour in the long term.

“The partnership is more about discoverability and less about dramatically changing distribution, because at the end of the day, distribution still happens through app stores, be it the Google Play Store or the Apple App Store,” Balakrishnan said. “The idea is that, as an Airtel subscriber, users can access these premium capabilities within Adobe Express without having to go anywhere else,” he said.

The way tech companies like Adobe are choosing local telecom providers to offer long-term free access to their AI tools in India is a smart business move. For Adobe, partnering with telecom providers such as Airtel provides instant access to massive user bases, built-in payment relationships (since users already pay their phone bills), trust in well-known telecom brands, and distribution through apps people already use, such as the Airtel Thanks app.

Perhaps the bigger deal is how these partnerships solve the payment hassles Indians often face when subscribing to international services, including high failure rates due to banking restrictions, transaction blocks and card rejections. By offering AI tools for free or bundling them with Airtel’s existing plans, tech companies bypass these issues entirely, reducing friction and user drop-off during sign-ups.

“The barrier to access and discovery is lowered through the Airtel partnership, and the barrier to creativity is lowered through the product itself and the capabilities of the product,” Balakrishnan agrees.

Free access and training AI models

Balakrishnan says students are a primary target audience for Express Premium. Many Indian students already use Express extensively for school assignments, passion projects, and social media content, and making Express Premium available for free to all Airtel subscribers adds significant value.

The paid subscription of Adobe Express, dubbed Express Premium, costs around Rs 4,000. However, Adobe is offering the plan free nationwide for one year through a partnership with Airtel. (Image: Adobe)

For better or worse, the model is designed to become a part of your daily workflow, integrating these AI tools into your routine. The key question is: what will happen when the free period ends? This will determine whether users are willing to pay a monthly fee to use these AI tools, a model that Netflix championed successfully.

With global AI tech companies offering free access to their tools to attract millions of users, some worry that India could become a testing ground for gathering data, refining models, and experimenting with AI use cases on a large scale before anywhere else.

When asked about whether the free access to premium subscription has something to do with training their models, Balakrishnan said, “We do not train our AI models on users data. The partnership (with Airtel) is not driven in any way, shape or form, by wanting to train on users data”.

“We train all our AI models. We are very particular about this. We train all our AI models on content that we have licensed to, and we have publicly stated that there is no training that happens on users’ data, and there is no intention to do that in the future,” he said.