India's artificial intelligence talent is concentrated in specialist pools and there are steep talent gaps in roles such as AI deployment and engineering, AI governance and AI security, according to the latest AI talent report by staffing firm Quess Corp.

GenAI deployment has the widest gap at 83%, followed by AI deployment engineering at 72%, AI governance at 70%, machine learning operations (MLOps) at 68%, AI security at 67%, and natural language processing at 63%, the report said.

The three- to five-year experience band carries the steepest demand at 49.5%, it said.


IT services make up about 45% of GenAI demand, the report said, as more companies move from testing AI to using it at scale. BFSI and retail come next. BFSI, IT services and GCCs account for 60% of AI deployment demand, since these areas need strict, error-free systems.

AI governance jobs are growing three times faster than overall AI hiring in regulated sectors like BFSI, pharma and healthcare, the report said. New data protection rules are pushing this growth. GCCs lead MLOps demand, making up 55% of it, as platform engineering becomes their biggest strength.

This shortage is mainly in specialist roles, the report said. Hiring for basic AI and analytics skills remains steady, with smaller gaps in foundational machine learning (29%) and decision intelligence (17%). Overall, demand is moving toward AI systems built for scale, governance and reliable business use, it said.

The report found that India's AI talent market has nearly 920,000 professionals, the second most in the world, with core AI skills, such as building models, agents and embedded solutions, who have used these skills in the last 90 days. In these segments, the report said, there are nearly 350,000 active AI-related job roles.

IT services lead the talent market, employing 500,000 professionals, followed by global capability centres (250,000) and enterprises (170,000), with most of this workforce in embedded AI roles.

"The biggest finding of our report is that India is not about AI builders. It is more about production—the country is moving towards production," Kapil Joshi, IT staffing chief executive at Quess, told ET. "When we look at the demand-supply gap, the biggest gap is for roles responsible for production."

In the three- to five-year experience band, there is active demand for 172,000 against an available talent pool of 247,000. But only a smaller, production-ready segment holds deployment-scale capabilities across open-source frameworks (LangChain), retrieval-augmented generation (RAG), MLOps, and large language model operations (LLMOps) environments.

The findings come amid growing fears among employees of losing jobs to AI. While most core AI models are still built by US companies such as Anthropic and OpenAI, Indian sovereign AI companies are getting a push from government schemes such as the IndiaAI Mission.

The report found that demand is no longer concentrated in data scientists, machine learning engineers, or research roles. "AI capability is moving into software engineering, cloud, cybersecurity, product, sales, marketing, finance, HR, customer experience, governance and operations," the report said.

More than 70% of the workforce now sits in AI-embedded roles, making AI a horizontal capability rather than a vertical function, it added.

Tier-1 cities account for nearly 85-88% of India's overall AI workforce supply. Within the more specialised core AI talent segment, these cities contribute 93-95% of the workforce.

Sector adoption is diverging fast: IT services and BFSI lead, retail, manufacturing and telecom are scaling selectively, while healthcare and pharma face the sharpest skill scarcity. Most of the workforce is reskilling to stay relevant.