By DEBANGANA GHOSH & MANSI VERMA
According to Nasscom’s State of Data Science and AI Skills report, India has16 percent of the world’s AI talent pool and one of the largest annual STEM supply lines, with 2.25 million graduates.
If there is one trend that has kept the technology world buzzing since the beginning of 2023, it is artificial intelligence (AI), ChatGPT and companies rushing to find their way in. The difference between the rising demand and existing supply of talent left a gaping hole in skilled resources globally to build these technologies.
The solution for this talent crisis may lie with India.
According to Nasscom’s State of Data Science and AI Skills report, India harbours 16 percent of the world’s AI talent pool — second only to China. Despite this, there is a shortfall of 213,000 skilled AI resources in India.
To be sure, the country also has one of the largest annual STEM supply lines, with 2.25 million graduates, who with upskilling and the right training, could quickly fill in this gap.
Moneycontrol reached out to government bodies, human resource experts and AI operators to understand if they are bullish on India to live up to its reputation as the ‘world’s talent hub’.
Abhishek Singh, managing director and CEO of Digital India Corporation (DIC), and president & CEO of the National eGovernance Division, told Moneycontrol that India has immense potential to become “the largest feeder of skilled AI talent for global tech giants.”
This is evident from India’s leading ranking in most global AI talent indices. According to the Stanford AI index, India ranks first for the Number of GitHub contributions by region as well as AI talent penetration. The country also has a diverse talent pool with rank one in AI Talent Penetration for Women, according to the Stanford Index, said Singh.
“From the software part of AI solutioning perspectives, it is well known that Indian technology talent is most sought after globally for IT solutions. The skilled resources are required for the entire lifecycle of AI solutions, right from ideation, design, testing, to continuous development, and continuous integration. Indian IT talent can and is easily being evolved to deliver the aforesaid AI enabled products and services,” Singh said.
Similarly, Rituparna Chakraborty, co-founder and director of staffing firm TeamLease Services, highlighted that India is the source of a majority of the world’s tech talent to fill in AI roles.
“India is home to 65 percent of the global IT offshore work and 40 percent of global business processing. It is expected that 69 percent of jobs in such kinds of formal employment will be automated by 2030,” Chakraborty said in a note.
According to experts, India’s untapped technological talent has previously demonstrated the potential to upskill and meet domain-specific talent demand. Rohit Srivastava, an expert in AI hiring and senior partner at Longhouse Consulting, an executive search and talent advisory firm, said that a similar trend had been witnessed with the evolution of the product management function in India over the last decade.
“If you see, probably 10 years back, when startups actually were beginning to grow in India, a function like product management never existed in India. There were a lot of young engineers who got groomed into this function with the startup culture growing,” said Srivastava.
Today, product management has reached an advanced stage as a function within India and a similar pattern is also emerging in the realm of data science and AI, he said.
“There's a substantial pool of highly skilled technical graduates entering the industry and a significant amount of exceptional talent in the engineering field currently focused on solving various challenges related to data engineering and science, and possessing the capability to be trained and become experts in those domains,” Srivastava added.
Spike in global demand for AI talent
As AI took over the world, it pitted global technology giants against each other to gain market dominance, be it chipmaker NVIDIA or software developers Microsoft and Google.
Similarly, with an increase in the number of global capability centres (GCCs) being established in India, along with the growing adoption and innovation of AI among these organisations, there is an anticipation of a significant increase in demand, said Kapil Joshi, Deputy CEO, Quess IT Staffing.
“We expect that as demand rises, there will be a requirement for more HTD programs to help recondition programmers towards AI/ML capabilities to meet this surge,” he added.
In addition, system integrators or IT services firms such as Accenture, Tata Consultancy Services (TCS) and Infosys, too, collaborated and launched offerings in the fear of missing out on the opportunity.
Smaller companies and startups across sectors are navigating their way to understand the utility and implementation of AI in daily tasks, both customer-facing and internal.
According to Chakraborty of TeamLease Services, over 85 percent of global businesses use AI, primarily to predict sales and enhance email marketing. With the need for more AI-backed apps and systems, the number of AI startups, too, has grown 14 times since 2000, with an increase of about six times in incoming investment.
On the back of the above, the industry has been witnessing a growing demand for AI talent. According to data by foundit insights tracker, in FY23 while India’s average quarterly AI-focused job openings stood at 74,257, in the first quarter of FY24 about 81,585 AI-focused job openings were recorded.
“By the end of FY 23-24, there will be close to 1,50,000 new jobs that would require a large pool of skilled engineers, data scientists, and AI researchers,” said Sekhar Garisa, CEO of foundit (previously Monster India).
This comes despite a hiring freeze in the tech ecosystem. While employee addition at Indian unicorns fell to a fifth in the first half of 2023 with rising diligence in expenditure, four out of India’s top five Information Technology companies have also reported a fall in headcount in the first quarter of FY24.
The increase in AI talent demand also seems to be a good opportunity for tech talent in India to upskill and become eligible for these roles to beat the overall slowdown in hiring.
Upskilling to bridge gap
According to foundit’s Garisa, individuals with AI expertise are projected to be in high demand.
“To navigate this landscape effectively, it becomes imperative for both individuals and governments to proactively equip themselves to embrace these changes,” he said.
Chakraborty said in a note that there is a significant gap of around 51 percent between the current demand and supply of AI professionals. The estimated demand for AI professionals in India by 2024 is expected to exceed 1 million, she said.
Consequently, corporates and industry bodies such as Nasscom have taken it upon themselves to build this capacity by upskilling existing talent.
During the recent Q1 IT earnings season, generative AI and elaborate plans to train associates in AI capabilities became the talking point to keep investors hooked. TCS, the country’s largest IT services firm, already has a ready pool of 50,000 trained associates in AI and ML skills, and plans to train another 100,000 associates.
Wipro plans to train 250,000 asNasscomsociates in AI skills, while HCLTech has a target of having 20,000 trained associates over the next 18 months. Tech Mahindra has already trained around 8,000 employees in generative AI capabilities.
Technology giant NVIDIA has been partnering with educational institutions globally to train students in AI skills at college levels since 2017. In India, it has partnered with most major IITs, including IIT Bombay.
Alankar Alankar, Associate professor at IIT Bombay, said that NVIDIA, in fact, has been working with the institute for the last four years around AI and ML research.
“One of the projects we were working on was around machine learning with NVIDIA, wherein we were trying to develop a model using neural networks to solve complex mathematical equations directly, without using any data…That work is now published and we have continued working with NVIDIA on other applications,” he told Moneycontrol.
Technology industry body Nasscom created a FutureSkills Prime Platform in 2020 with the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology (MeitY), in partnership with industry, to offer short-term courses as well as graduate-level courses in AI and Emerging Technologies.
The platform currently has over 1.4 million registered users. It currently has 30-40 partners offering AI, big tech, cybersecurity and cloud based courses.
“We have national programmes on AI, we have committees set up to only look at what the AI curriculum should be in both colleges and schools to prepare someone to have a mindset on what it takes to work in an AI world,” said Kirti Seth, CEO, Sector Skills Council, Nasscom.
She added that the AI talent shortage is a global issue, and as per Nasscom’s data, the US is witnessing the highest shortage. Countries such as Germany and Canada too are seeing gaps. In comparison, India’s local demand is still low.
“India’s gap in terms of local demand is low — at 21% it is the lowest in the technology space. But the fact is, we serve the world. They will look at us for support, as their shortages are too high,” she said.
https://www.moneycontrol.com/news/business/startup/bullish-on-india-why-india-will-be-the-ai-talent-hub-of-the-world-11207021.html
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