India Facing AI Talent Shortage – Roles Need Consulting, Leadership & Tech Expertise

India’s ambition to lead in AI hinges on urgently addressing talent, data, and research gaps. As global demand for AI talent surges, the country faces a critical shortage that could hinder its growth and innovation and ability to capitalize on the opportunity fully. As AI and macro trends enable globalization to shift from goods to services, India will also face a shortage of talent, despite being “a digital talent nation.”

Underscoring the people aspect of monetizing investments in AI, a McKinsey reports points out that “employees will be the ones to make their organizations AI powerhouses. They are more ready to embrace AI in the workplace than business leaders imagine. They are more familiar with AI tools, they want more support and training, and they are more likely to believe AI will replace at least a third of their work in the near future. Now it’s imperative that leaders step up. They have more permission space than they realize, so it’s on them to be bold and capture the value of AI. Now.” Employees, according to this report, anticipate AI will have a dramatic impact on their work. Now they would like their companies to invest in the training that will help them succeed.

The AI roles in demand today demand a unique combination of consulting expertise, leadership abilities, and technical proficiency. These inherently multidimensional positions are notoriously difficult to staff. Industry leaders emphasize that simply hiring AI specialists isn’t sufficient—organizations require professionals who can bridge technical mastery with strategic business acumen, prioritizing measurable organizational value over purely technical achievements.

This dual focus on AI and business impact makes qualified candidates exceptionally rare, leading to prolonged hiring cycles. AI roles now take ~10% longer to fill than other technology positions, as companies struggle to recruit talent capable of translating AI capabilities into tangible commercial outcomes. The gap between demand and supply for these business-savvy AI experts continues to widen, creating a critical talent shortage.

AI roles increasingly require multidisciplinary expertise, blending advanced technical capabilities with strategic business alignment.

Organizations seek professionals who demonstrate:

• Mastery of ML frameworks (TensorFlow, PyTorch) and programming languages (Python/R)
• Experience in MLOps pipelines (cloud platforms like AWS/GCP/Azure)
• Proficiency with generative AI tools (LLM fine-tuning, vector databases)

Cross-Functional Fluency:

• Product sense to align AI solutions with market needs (e.g., healthcare-specific AI requires clinical workflow understanding)
• Risk governance expertise to address bias, privacy, and regulatory compliance
• Stakeholder communication skills to translate technical concepts for non-technical leaders

While some reports suggest that India is short on talent in all tiers, as per most estimates, India currently has predominantly low-tier AI talent per the Carnegie India study.  India has a growing comparative advantage in medium- and low-expertise talent, given its fast-growing developer base in the AI/machine learning (ML) space, especially compared to the rest of the world. India is one of the top contributors to GitHub AI projects, a fairly reliable metric for the number of developers undertaking AI coding projects. The Indian developer community on GitHub is now the second-largest and fastest-growing one, and it is expected to overtake that of the United States by 2028.

Meanwhile, a report from Quess, one of India’s leading staffing organization, AI-related job roles are projected to grow by as much as 45% in FY26, significantly outpacing the broader slowdown in technology hiring, according to data from Quess IT Staffing. This surge is attributed to rising AI adoption across various industries, driven by increased client investments, a strong AI-first vision, and rapid deployment of technologies like generative AI and cloud computing. Despite a tech hiring slowdown, AI demand is surging, driven by GenAI, cloud adoption, and productivity needs.