India’s AI workforce reaches 9.2 lakh as hiring shifts from experimentation to execution
New Delhi, June 17 (IANS) India now has an estimated 9.2 lakh AI professionals as the majority of total hiring demand of 3.5 lakh roles moved sharply from experimentation to execution, a report said on Wednesday.
India’s 9.2 lakh AI professionals comprise about 2.57 lakh in Core AI roles and 6.63 lakh in AI‑embedded roles, the report from workforce solutions firm Quess Corp said, and employers are increasingly seeking talent that can deploy, govern, integrate and scale AI within real business workflows.
Governance, AgentOps, runtime operations, evaluation and quality assurance functions accounted for 26 per cent of hiring demand as AI adoption matures. Organisations are placing greater emphasis on these roles to ensure AI systems are secure, reliable and enterprise-ready.
The report noted that GCCs are hiring for reusable internal AI platforms, enterprise integration and governance, while IT services want to deliver AI across client programmes. Enterprises are hiring selectively to connect AI to finance, risk, operations, customer experience and employee systems.
“Enterprises are embedding AI directly into business workflows and decision-making. Together, they are creating a new talent landscape where execution capability matters more than experimentation,” said Kapil Joshi, CEO – Quess IT Staffing.
“More than 70 per cent of India’s AI workforce now sits outside traditional AI specialist roles, while nearly one-third of all AI demand is emerging from business functions such as operations, customer service, marketing, finance, governance, and workforce management,” he added.
Customer operations alone could see 45–60 per cent of workflows augmented by AI, while marketing functions are undergoing one of the fastest AI-led transformations.
The report said that 66–68 per cent of active job postings are for Core AI roles while 32–34 per cent are for AI‑embedded roles, a demand mix that contrasts with the supply base where 72–74 per cent of the workforce sits in AI‑embedded roles and only 26–28 per cent in Core AI.
Non-tech business functions now account for roughly 1.2 lakh AI-skill-cited demand, led by operations at 57,000 postings.
—IANS
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