 "India's AI talent pool over 400,000 strong, but gaps exists")
India’s AI talent pool has 416,000 professionals, but with a 51 per cent demand-supply gap, there is an an urgent need to build future-ready capabilities.
Between March 2024 and March 2025, three categories of roles have become prominent in the AI landscape.
- Prompt Engineers and GenAI Researchers now account for over 10 per cent of new AI job postings, a significant jump from under 2 per cent in 2023.
- Data Engineering has become the backbone of GenAI infrastructure. 18 per cent to 22 per cent of job descriptions for data engineers explicitly reference orchestration tools (Airflow, Dagster) alongside LLM-specific capabilities.
- Cloud engineers are expected to own AI infrastructure. Over 16 per cent of cloud job postings now include responsibilities for AI deployment, GPU orchestration, or LLM stack integration -- up from 8 per cent a year prior.
About 70 per cent of the high complexity, GenAI-enabled hiring in India is done by global capability centres (GCCs), system integrators and product firms.
- System integrators hire about 38 per cent of the total AI hiring in areas such as deployment scale, MLOPs integration and cloud modernisation.
- GCCs hire about 22.5 per cent in areas such as GenAI teams, platform engineering and AI lifecycle roles.
- Product development firms hire about 12 per cent in areas such as feature-led innovation, inference ops, GenAI-driven personalisation.
Employers, particularly GCCs and product firms, are investing in modular reskilling programs designed to convert adjacent-role talent into GenAI-ready contributors in 8-12 weeks. The common pathways include:
Prompt Engineering
LangChain & RAG Workflows
Vector Database & Embedding Fundamentals
LLMOps Toolchains
AI Governance & Explainability
AI Salary Surge:
Entry-level professionals earn Rs 8 lakh-12 lakh per annum
Specialists in NLP and GenAI with 5 to 8 years of experience command Rs 25 lakh–35 lakh per annum
Senior professionals are drawing Rs 45 lakh per annum + in product firms and GCCs.
Source: Quess Corp, Decoding India's AI Talent Landscape
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