India has less than 2,000 senior AI engineers to build core products: Report

Even as the tech sector is riding the AI boom, India has less than 2,000 senior engineers who can build AI core products, revealed data from specialist staffing firm Xpheno, accessed by Moneycontrol. This comes, despite Technology product and IT services companies are reportedly training thousands of employees in artificial intelligence (AI) skills over the past year.

Core AI products and services include AI-based apps, tools and platforms, to name a few.

AI training

As per Moneycontrol, Tata Consultancy Services recently said it had trained 350,000 employees in AI skills; Infosys said eight out of 10 employees are AI-ready; Accenture is upskilling 250,000 employees in AI; HCLTech has trained 50,000 employees; Microsoft India plans to skill 2 million people in AI by 2025, and IBM has globally committed to train 2 million people in AI by 2026.

The Xpheno report further mentioned that the total active accessible Indian talent with the minimum required skills, experience and exposure to core AI is a little under 21,000. Meanwhile Nasscom claimed that 650,000-700,000 people are trained on AI across top-tier tech companies.

Skill Building

Moneycontrol quoted experts and said that there are other aspects of AI skilling - beyond building core technologies - that are more geared to embedding and integrating AI to improve daily tasks and productivity. This training is not restricted to engineering talent but is also about skilling other functions such as marketing and even HR.

“The (AI) training that people are doing is more mass market," said Jagdish Mitra, a tech veteran and board member of the non-profit National Skill Development Corporation. "And that's not what will be valuable. What will be valuable is process-specific, application-specific and industry-specific skilling that will make a difference to how the skills are being used. It has to be more specific, otherwise it's like a man walking around with a hammer trying to find a nail.”

Citing a recent Nasscom and BCG report, Sangeeta Gupta, senior VP at Nasscom told Moneycontrol that the AI talent will grow 15% year on year; and there is already a demand-supply gap of about 51% for niche skills that will help build core AI.

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