India’s EdTech challenge is not a lack of content, but making learning fit the realities of students beyond metropolitan centres. Prempreet Singh, CEO & Founder of SkillBytes, believes the next phase of EdTech must reduce friction and meet learners where they already are. In this conversation with Education Edge Global, Singh discusses SkillBytes’ WhatsApp-first approach, learner engagement, AI-powered personalised learning, and the future of accessible education in India.
The EdTech sector has traditionally focused on apps, video lectures, and live classes, yet adoption in Tier 2 and Tier 3 India remains a challenge. What do you believe the industry has fundamentally misunderstood about how students in these markets learn and engage with technology?
The industry misunderstood where the problem was. It assumed students in Tier 2 and Tier 3 India needed more content, better content, or more sophisticated technology. But India already has more learning content than any student could realistically consume. The real gap was format and friction.
Most EdTech products are built on an assumption that students will download an app, create an account, open it regularly, and sit down for a focused block of study. Real students, especially outside the metros, have fragmented time, basic smartphones, and intermittent connectivity. They may have the motivation to learn, but the product asks them to change their behaviour before they can even begin.
The signal is in how students actually behave once you remove that ask. Across more than 8 lakh students and tens of millions of learning interactions, the pattern that holds is simple: when learning fits inside a student’s real day, they return to it. So the next phase of EdTech will be less about building another destination for learning and more about removing the distance between a student and the learning itself.
SkillBytes has taken a WhatsApp-first approach to learning instead of asking students to download and navigate another education app. What insight about learner behaviour led you to build the platform around a channel students already use every day?
Years of building consumer products taught me one thing: the moment you ask people to change their behaviour, you lose a large number of them. You are not just asking them to learn. You are asking them to download something, create an account, understand a new interface, and build a new habit, all before they get any value.
Students already had a device, some connectivity, and one platform they were completely comfortable using every day. So instead of asking them to come to us, we built SkillBytes around where they already were. WhatsApp is not a distribution channel for us. It is the product environment. No download, no login, no separate platform to navigate. When you remove that friction, adoption stops being about convincing students to try something new and becomes about making learning fit the behaviour they already have.
You have described the EdTech challenge as being less about the availability of content and more about changing learning behaviour. How does SkillBytes address this behaviour gap, and what metrics do you use to measure meaningful learner engagement and retention?
Solving the behaviour gap means making learning small enough and accessible enough that students can actually complete it. A SkillByte is a short, focused unit of learning that happens inside the same chat students are already using. There is no context switch and no large block of time to set aside before learning can begin.
We measure engagement through interaction, not downloads or registrations. SkillBytes has reached more than 8 lakh students and generated tens of millions of learning interactions, with over 30 messages in an active session. Those interactions are a more honest signal, because they tell us whether students are actually using the product and coming back to it. The most important metric is not how many students sign up once. It is whether a SkillByte becomes part of a student’s routine rather than something they have to be reminded to do.
With AI rapidly transforming education, how do you see AI-powered, personalised learning changing the way students prepare for competitive examinations such as JEE?
It helps to separate what AI does well today from where the technology is heading. Today, AI lets us deliver the right practice at the scale of lakhs of students at once, give instant feedback while attention is still warm, and keep the experience light enough to live inside a chat. That is the part that is real and running now, and for a student preparing for an exam like JEE it already changes how efficiently limited study time gets used.
The larger opportunity is still ahead. Personalised learning was historically limited by the availability of individual teachers and tutors. As the technology matures, the sector is moving toward experiences that respond to each learner individually, serving the right level of practice and focusing time where a student is weakest, rather than designing for the average learner. That direction is where our roadmap points. It is the goal the technology now makes possible, not a finished capability anyone should claim to have solved. What we are focused on is understanding learning behaviour at scale, because that understanding is the foundation everything more personalised will eventually be built on.
As AI makes high-quality learning more accessible and potentially lowers the cost of personalised education, do you believe it can genuinely help bridge India’s education divide? What are the biggest barriers that still need to be addressed?
Yes, AI can play a significant role, but AI alone will not solve it. The real prize is making the quality of a student’s learning less dependent on their geography, their family income, or which teacher they happen to have access to.
The barriers are not only technological. If the technology requires expensive devices, high-speed connectivity, multiple downloads, or complicated interfaces, it will still leave most students behind. Digital access, affordability, awareness, and the discipline to design around how students actually live all matter as much as the AI itself. Which is why our principle is simple: build for the most constrained student first. If the product works for the student with the least, it has a far better chance of working for everyone else.
Looking ahead, how do you see the Indian education landscape evolving over the next five years, and what role do SkillBytes aspire to play in making learning more accessible, personalised, and relevant for the next generation of students?
The biggest shift over the next five years will be that access to quality learning becomes far less dependent on where a student lives or how many good teachers happen to be near them. AI and new delivery formats will make it possible to bring more relevant learning to students at a scale that was not possible before. But the industry needs to move past the idea that innovation means building another app. The next phase is about understanding how students actually learn and meeting them where they already spend their time.
That is the role SkillBytes aspires to play. We started with Class 10 and 12 board preparation and are extending the same model into JEE, NEET, SAT, IELTS and UPSC. We are still early, and the day-to-day work is very specific: getting more students to learn more, more often. But if we can build that at scale, a student’s future can be determined by their ability and willingness to work, not by where they were born or what their family could afford.
