India is rapidly becoming a hub for artificial intelligence (AI) jobs with a whopping 45,000 positions currently open, according to a report by HR solutions company Teamlease Digital. AI is a major technology focus as part of the India-US Initiative for Critical and Emerging Technologies (iCET) agreement struck last year, laying the groundwork for countless job opportunities and an influx of economic growth.
The roles on offer are vast and varied, with retail, healthcare, manufacturing, and banking & financial services topping the list. In healthcare alone, roles like clinical data analyst and medical imaging specialist are needed. Banking & finance, meanwhile, are on the hunt for chatbot developers, fraud analysts, and credit risk analysts. Manufacturing will require industrial data scientists, process automation specialists, and predictive maintenance engineers. Retail’s needs include data analysts and IT process modellers.
Data engineers and machine learning engineers can expect salaries of Rs 14 lakhs a year, even as freshers, while DevOps engineers and data architects can make around Rs 12 per year. By the time those engineers reach their eighth year, offers of up to Rs 40 lakhs can be expected.
Teamlease Digital’s report mentions that India has a talent base of 4 lakh AI professionals, and accounts for 16% of the global AI talent base. However, 80% of Indian engineers are not equipped to meet their employers’ expectations, missing out on advanced AI know-how. Additionally, India only accounts for a mere 1.5% of the global AI investment pie, leaving much room for growth.
AI-generated revenues in India in 2022 is expected to be around US$12.3 billion, and India’s investments are growing at a CAGR of 30.8%, set to reach US$881 million in 2023. According to a Harvard Business Review study in 2021, Bengaluru has the world’s second-largest AI talent pool, and is ranked fifth globally on the list of the world’s best AI talent locations. Other cities such as New Delhi, Hyderabad, and Mumbai follow at 18th, 19th, and 27th.
There are four types of AI in use – vision AI, conversational AI, sense AI, and decision AI. Vision AI deals with documents, images and videos, relying on sensors, cameras, neural networks and ML algorithms; conversational AI can do voice- or text-based interactions; sense AI is used to read emotions and provide data, while decision AI helps with decision making and reasoning.
The demands of these roles call for a wide range of skills, including DB query language, scripting, deep learning, natural language processing (NLP), reinforcement learning, predictive analytics, robotics, neural networks, cloud computing, data visualisation, computer vision, predictive modelling, and statistics.
Freshers are needed for positions such as software engineering, data analyst, application developer, business analyst, statistical or quantitative analyst, and operations research analyst while more experienced candidates may apply for roles as machine learning scientist, NLP engineer, machine learning engineer, image processing engineer, and data scientist.
Teamlease Digital, established in 2000 and headquartered in Bangalore, is one of India’s leading human resource solutions and services providers. The company offers end-to-end HR solutions for small, mid-sized and big businesses, from performance management to talent assessment. Their research reports have helped inform policy makers as well as employers, enabling them to better take advantage of the opportunities of Digital India.
