After a long wait, the Union Public Service Commission (UPSC) 2026 prelims results were released last week. Neha (name changed), 23, a humanities student, did not clear it. She is upset, she says, but was not banking on clearing the civil services examination in her first attempt.

UPSC is one of India’s most prestigious competitive examinations for recruiting senior government administrators, and has long been tied to prestige, social mobility and job security. The success rate is below 1% — which is why entire neighbourhoods, such as Old Rajinder Nagar and Mukherjee Nagar in Delhi, came up around its preparation.

Today, increasingly, aspirants like Neha are preparing for the UPSC (which has three stages: preliminary, main and interview) by themselves. The reasons are many, from circumventing expensive coaching fees to creating hyper-personalised study material. Neha didn’t want to leave her Nagpur home to enrol in a coaching centre, so she paid over ₹1 lakh to enrol in a year-long online classroom by a well-known Delhi-based institute. It didn’t add any incremental value though, and she often found it difficult to schedule a weekly one-on-one session with her mentor. So, she left the course midway and turned to self-study and a new coach: books, downloadable material, short-form explainer videos, and Artificial Intelligence (AI).

At mealtimes, she would watch 2-3 exam strategy videos of UPSC toppers; she subscribed to 10-15 Telegram channels, and downloaded PDFs into a folder named Mission CSE. She used Claude, feeding bulky government reports such as India’s annual Economic Survey into it along with her own notes, and asked Anthropic’s popular model to summarise it in a language she could understand — something no institute can replicate at scale. Of the 7-8 hours Neha studied daily, she dedicated an hour to Claude. “The syllabus is so vast that on most days you go to bed feeling you haven’t covered what you should have,” she says.

But she isn’t giving up. Next year, she plans to prepare the same way, with Gemini AI as her aid (her cousin successfully used Google’s AI assistant to crack her CAT exams and get into IIM). Neha plans to prompt it to generate topic-wise questions sorted by difficulty.

The great UPSC coaching disruption

Gemini AI is what Prateek Mudgal, 25, from Aligarh, who secured All India Rank (AIR) 54 in CSE 2025, used to score his answer-writing practice against past toppers’ responses, and generate key points on the art and architecture of various medieval history dynasties. In the actual exam, there was a question on the Chandela dynasty and he found this exercise immensely helpful in answering that question.

He also fed keyword prompts from his DAF (Detailed Application Form) to generate potential interview questions. For instance, he fed the term ‘Youth Parliament’ and Gemini gave possible questions around the importance of it. “The key is to use it within a limit,” he says.

Students share that they upload their education background, hometown, optional subjects, work experience and hobbies into AI, and prompts along these lines: “Act as the UPSC Board Member. Ask me one question at a time based on my DAF. Score my responses. Challenge weak answers.” Others ask Claude and ChatGPT to interrupt answers, challenge assumptions, play a sceptical panel member, and ask uncomfortable questions. It helps them develop composure, address rambling and lack of structure. There is infinite practice, instant feedback and no embarrassment.

“Earlier, revision meant carrying stacks of notes,” says U. Harshaveena from Chennai, who secured AIR 257 in 2025. “Now, AI turns my handwritten pages into crisp flash cards and quizzes me whenever I have free time.” Patna-based Priya Kumari, AIR 232 (in 2025, her fifth attempt), adds that AI helped her the most at the interview stage.

From coaching halls to chatbots

A decade ago, authority resided with institutions; teachers were gatekeepers. Now, Telegram admins shape opinion, YouTube educators have cult followings, and Reddit communities audit institutes in real time. “Free content is the first hook,” says a Delhi-based faculty at a coaching institute, on condition of anonymity, of Telegram, which has with its anonymity and closed groups become many aspirants’ primary community. “If one video gets a lakh views and 1,000 students pay, job well done,” he continues.

Over the last two years, AI has been supplanting, if not replacing, traditional modes of coaching and preparing for competitive examinations. ChatGPT has Study Mode, Google has Gemini Live, and Anthropic has Claude Voice; the last one, aspirants say, is increasingly being used as a discussion partner rather than a quiz machine. Specialised tools such as SuperKalam, an AI-powered UPSC preparation platform, also offer personalised study plans, daily targets and progress tracking.

This has sounded the death knell for several smaller institutes, including Delhi’s Chahal Academy, IAS Gurukul and 99 Notes, which downed their shutters in recent months. Anmol Goyal, founder and CEO of 99 Notes, which had around 600 students until last year, said in news interviews: “Our institute shut down, and AI was a key factor. AI has become a significant part of UPSC preparation, and aspirants are moving towards it.”

The ‘artificial’ classroom

Not to be left behind, coaching centres are using AI such as Claude, NotebookLM and ChatGPT, says the anonymous faculty member. “How they are prompting is what differentiates them. That nuance comes from experience in this ecosystem,” says the above mentioned Delhi-based coaching faculty member. The broader trend, educators explain, has been a push towards brevity and sharper content delivery, particularly for prelims preparation, where concise revision-friendly material is increasingly valued.

“Content is no longer scarce; attention and direction are. This is why we built alchemist.study, an agentic AI architecture that personalises study paths, evaluates answers, and frees our faculty to do what algorithms cannot — mentor,” says M. Senthil Kumar, director of Aram IAS Academy, Chennai. “The future of coaching is not human versus machine, but machines handling scale while teachers handle judgment, doubt and the resolve to persist.”

At Officers IAS Academy, Chennai, director Israel Jebasingh says, “We put out current affairs videos daily and use AI in prelims, mains and all preparation material, as additional support.” Last year’s AIR 2 Rajeshwari Suve M., who had cleared Tamil Nadu’s TNPSC exam the previous year and enrolled as a deputy collector, “was a student of our classroom”, he adds. “We have an exclusive R&D team, with almost 25 members. In our academy, there has been no drop in student numbers [around 1,200 annual enrolments] due to AI or social media.”

Dr. Sankara Saravanan, additional director, All India Civil Services Coaching Center, Tamil Nadu, says, “My student Gee Gee, who secured a place in the Indian Foreign Service (IFS) in 2025, in an interview acknowledged that the facts, data points, keywords, and analytical inputs that I had mined using AI tools helped her prepare and develop a deeper and more nuanced understanding of various subjects.”

Old school in new capsule

Meanwhile, legacy institutes such as Vajiram & Ravi, Rau’s IAS and Drishti IAS still emphasise structured material, faculty, peer group and a trusted voice to cut through the noise. Newer specialist platforms offer targeted support even for less popular optional subjects, such as Sanket Jain’s Psyche Simplified, for the psychology optional paper. This didn’t have many players earlier.

Zeyaul Mustafa, teacher and founder of Dr. UPSC channel on YouTube, says, “In the age of social media, you cannot completely ignore Reels and YouTube Shorts. Students now encounter concepts beyond classroom walls. The problem is the illusion that collecting screenshots equals learning. I’d suggest students consume it mindfully instead of doomscrolling. Short-form content can never replace regular classes, reading standard books, and self-studying.”

“With AI, it may have become easier to prepare without coaching,” says Abhijeet Yadav, who runs UPSCprep.com, a YouTube platform with 550,000 subscribers, but “niche optional papers still favour specialist teachers [as domain expertise is necessary]”, and main exam answers benefit from human feedback.

Jain argues that short-form content is weakening deep reading and answer-writing skills. According to him, reading the newspaper is what builds analytical depth and not watching summarised videos. It’s a point that Prashant Tiwari, faculty member at Physics Wallah’s PW OnlyIAS — and the face of the current affairs explainer videos on YouTube channel UPSC Wallah — can get behind. He publishes daily current affairs videos that break down the day’s news from newspapers, for both Prelims and Mains preparation, and draws views in thousands.

“AI is a tool to help us; it is not an end-all method. Also, whatever data AI gives can be faulty or biased, so we should use our analytical ability to understand if it is useful or not,” says Chennai-based Arvind Radhakrishnan (son of IAS officer J. Radhakrishnan), who cleared the UPSC exam twice, once in 2022 when he ranked 361 and then in 2024 with rank 80.

“In 2022, ChatGPT was just a newspaper phenomenon; in 2024, I had the opportunity to use it myself. I did not depend on the AI engine completely for an answer. I just used it as a source to search for the data,” he says.

Technology may be reshaping preparation, but at the end of the day, traditional “mentoring and hand holding” remain essential, says Shubhangi Singh, a faculty member at Vajiram & Ravi. Because the highly competitive exam has not changed in its brutality. And the appeal goes beyond mere employment. “This job brings respect,” says Tiwari of PWOnlyIAS. “It raises the status of your family. With AI-driven firing happening everywhere, a government job brings certainty.”

The writer lives in Noida, works at a venture capital fund, and writes on pop culture, media and psychology.

With inputs from Aloysius Xavier Lopez and Tanushree Ghosh