Choosing your default AI assistant in India — and what to pay for

The problem

You have a free ChatGPT account, a Gemini account because you use Gmail, someone at work mentioned Claude, and your CRM has an AI button. You use all of them shallowly, learn none of them, and have paid for at least one you have opened twice. Meanwhile the actual determinant of your output quality — whether you know how to prompt one tool well — has not moved at all.

What you need

Role: Founder, 12-person digital marketing agency, Ahmedabad. Tasks: client reports, proposal drafts, social captions, competitor research, replying to client emails.

The tool

ChatGPT, Claude or Gemini

The prompt

What comes back

Test prompts — one per real task, e.g. Here is a client's monthly Google Ads export.

Verify before you use it

• Any price or feature list the AI produced is [TIME-SENSITIVE] — verify on the vendor's current pricing page, in INR, including GST.
• The data-residency and training answer must come from the vendor's terms, not from the model's memory of them.
• The client-contract question is real and is often overlooked. Check your own MSAs before pushing client data anywhere.
• Run the tests yourself. A comparison the AI writes about itself and its competitors is not evidence.