Demand for AI professionals in India is skyrocketing, leading to a shortage of specialized talent and lucrative job opportunities

As demand for Artificial Intelligence (AI) professionals skyrockets, the competition for specialised talent in India intensifies. Industry experts highlight that AI’s rapid adoption across industries creates a significant shortage of skilled workers.

With the AI talent pool expected to fall nearly 1 million short of the required workforce by 2027, companies are offering lucrative compensation packages to attract top talent. As AI continues to evolve, professionals with expertise in ML, deep learning, and Gen AI are seeing job switches, salary hikes of up to 45 per cent, and opportunities across sectors.

Neeti Sharma, CEO, TeamLease Digital, likened this to the mass hiring across industries during COVID-19, due to the surge in automation and digitalisation. This led to frequent job changes, higher increments, and retention strategies.

“With AI, the demand is high, but it’s more concentrated on specialised skills like ML, Deep Learning, and GenAI. Those with expertise in these areas are in high demand and are moving for better opportunities, higher pay, and more impactful roles,” she shared.

However, the current pool of AI-skilled workforce is limited, with the AI talent pool estimated to be about 1.2 million in India, with job opportunities projected to be around 3 million by 2028.

Scarcity of talent

“This scarcity is driving companies to offer better to attract and retain, in a few cases, they get a 30 per cent-45 per cent increase with each change.”

Aditya Narayan Mishra, MD & CEO of CIEL HR, attributed this scarcity to organisations racing to build their AI capabilities, with GenAI and advanced ML becoming critical business differentiators. This has fuelled a surge in demand for specialised roles—AI/ML Engineers, Data Scientists (NLP, AI, enterprise SaaS), and Lead Cloud Engineers—outpacing the supply of qualified professionals.

“Despite India producing 2.14 million STEM graduates annually, niche AI expertise in applied ML, deep learning, AI-driven data analytics, and AR app design remains scarce. The speed at which companies integrate AI has outpaced the upskilling of professionals. While many graduates have theoretical knowledge, practical AI experience with real-world datasets, model deployment, and cloud AI solutions is limited,” he said.

Kamal Karanth, Co-founder, specialist staffing company Xpheno, noted, “One should not be misled by the 5-digit AI talent counts that show up on CV searches on job boards and in enterprise content and conversations. This number does not factor in the true AI experience and expertise level of the talent in the high-niche AI engineering space. Applying the experience and expertise filters, the active pool of senior AI engineering talent in India is under 3,000. The overall true AI talent pool with AI engineering and AI product exposure is under 18,000 in India. The services end of the AI capabilities spectrum is growing faster compared to AI engineering and core development capabilities in India.”

According to Karanth, amidst the overall slowdown in tech hiring, AI-focused specialist talent demand in India has shrunk by over 70 per cent over the last 8-10 quarters. The current demand for AI-focused specialist talent is a little under 2,000 openings, with a lack of accessible talent in the market for the said roles. The overall active demand for AI-linked roles, including the services spectrum is over 20,000 and the right fit talent for these roles is either getting built or unavailable still. Estimates suggest that by 2030, AI jobs can multiply 8x to 10x of the current.

Sharma also shared that India is likely to face a significant shortage of AI talent by 2027 if no action is taken to create large AI skilled professionals. The demand for AI professionals is projected to exceed the supply by nearly one million workers. This gap arises because the AI talent pool is expected to grow to around 1.2 million, while job openings could surpass 2.73 million by 2028, with a gap of over 50 per cent.