India's AI Talent Landscape
India currently boasts a talent pool of 416,000 AI professionals. However, there exists a significant 51% demand-supply gap, highlighting the urgent need for developing future-ready capabilities.
Emerging AI Roles (March 2024 - March 2025)
- Prompt Engineers and GenAI Researchers
- These roles now account for over 10% of new AI job postings, increasing from under 2% in 2023.
- Data Engineers
- Data engineering serves as the backbone of GenAI infrastructure.
- 18% to 22% of job descriptions for data engineers explicitly reference orchestration tools like Airflow and Dagster alongside LLM-specific capabilities.
- Cloud Engineers
- Expected to manage AI infrastructure.
- Over 16% of cloud job postings now include responsibilities for AI deployment, GPU orchestration, or LLM stack integration, up from 8% the previous year.
Hiring Trends in AI
About 70% of high complexity, GenAI-enabled hiring in India is conducted by Global Capability Centres (GCCs), system integrators, and product firms.
- System Integrators
- Responsible for approximately 38% of total AI hiring.
- Focus on deployment scale, MLOPs integration, and cloud modernization.
- Global Capability Centres (GCCs)
- Account for about 22.5% of hiring.
- Target areas include GenAI teams, platform engineering, and AI lifecycle roles.
- Product Development Firms
- Contribute to about 12% of hiring.
- Emphasize feature-led innovation, inference operations, and GenAI-driven personalization.
Reskilling Initiatives
Employers, particularly GCCs and product firms, are heavily investing in modular reskilling programs to prepare adjacent-role talent for GenAI roles in 8-12 weeks. Key pathways include:
- Prompt Engineering
- LangChain & RAG Workflows
- Vector Database & Embedding Fundamentals
- LLMOps Toolchains
- AI Governance & Explainability
AI Salary Surge
- Entry-level professionals earn between Rs 8 lakh to Rs 12 lakh per annum.
- Specialists in NLP and GenAI with 5 to 8 years of experience can earn Rs 25 lakh to Rs 35 lakh per annum.
- Senior professionals in product firms and GCCs are drawing Rs 45 lakh per annum or more.
Source: Quess Corp, Decoding India's AI Talent Landscape