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India’s largest private financial services group HDFC, Reliance Industries Ltd and British energy conglomerate Shell are among the world’s top 75 firms by market value that are increasingly enlisting experts with deep AI knowledge to train their employees. Surging demand for their skills allows creators and consultants like Mehra to secure up to ₹25 lakh in a few weeks.
Mehra has been running his AI training venture, The Cutting Edge School, for the past three years. He is currently conducting a workshop for over 1,000 employees for a top retail firm–he refused to identify the client, citing a non-disclosure agreement.
“Most companies that come to us have three key problems that they want solved: one, their employees are still using outdated tools for functions such as marketing, content creation and outreach; two, most of them are not using AI the way it should be; and three, giving the right prompts to ensure that privacy and security of individuals is maintained,” Mehra said.
Demand for AI upskilling has exploded globally as the technology becomes part of corporate workflow across sectors. India, too, will need more than 1 million skilled AI workers within the next 12 months to keep up with the pace of AI adoption by companies and for the country to achieve its target of generating $35 billion of domestic product by 2047, a report by the ministry of electronics and information technology (Meity) said earlier this month.
AI tools to strategy
In most cases, trainers are identified because of their social media content or CXO references based on years of experience in AI. Courses offered cost ₹6-25 lakh for courses running for four to six weeks, and the number of participating employees can go as high as 1,000. These courses mostly cover primers on the fundamentals of AI, and hands-on guides on how to make the most of popular tools such as OpenAI’s ChatGPT, Google’s Gemini, Microsoft’s Copilot, Adobe’s Firefly, and more.
Companies are separately upskilling individual leaders to gain a deeper understanding of AI policy, lessons from lawsuits around the world, and strategies for how the technology can either add value or reduce costs. These courses typically cost ₹5,000-25,000 per person per week.
Mehra’s courses typically run for four weeks, and his 25-member team conducts 12 of them in a year—but aims to do more as demand ramps up.
“There is deep demand from companies for AI upskilling, and this demand is unlikely to die down,” said Kashyap Kompella, a veteran AI consultant. “The courses range from offering an introduction into the variety of AI tools available for various tasks, understanding their limitations and scope, the ethics and legality of it, and their applicability across the board—be it data analytics or for content generation.”
Kompella is conducting a six-week immersive AI training programme for more than 5,000 employees of a top Indian financial services firm.
“When used by capable individuals, AI can significantly enhance both personal and team productivity,” he said. “However, its impact depends heavily on how well users can collaborate with the technology. Companies are waking up to this today, and that is leading to heavy demand from conglomerates.”
Shell cited its silent period in response to Mint’s query, but acknowledged that the company is working with external consultants for AI upskilling across functions. HDFC Mutual Fund, Reliance Retail and Nestle did not respond to emailed queries.
Mid-career demand
Sridev Ramesh, 29, who cofounded AI developer and engineering content platform 100xEngineers, offers courses to mid-career corporate professionals keen to learn how best to use popular AI tools to augment existing work in professions such as digital marketing, content generation and more.
“The biggest takers for our AI upskilling courses are aged 30-35, and are mid-career corporate professionals from across domains who are either trying to catch up on AI skills, or gain a deeper understanding of how it can affect their work,” he said. “We just began our fifth cohort—which has about 200 takers. While students pay about ₹1.1 lakh for this six-month online-only course, working professionals are charged up to ₹1.4 lakh for it.”
While Ramesh, who holds a distance learning degree in astrophysics engineering from The Open University, UK, has offered custom AI upskilling programmes to companies, he prefers the open registration route where his courses are not tied to any particular firm.
“We offered an internal upskilling course for using AI for digital marketing use cases at Netflix. But, most companies need a customized programme for a set number of employees—we prefer to offer our own course, and there is a huge demand for them at our end,” said Ramesh. “We currently limit registrations at up to 200 candidates per cohort because that is our bandwidth—all the training is provided by my cofounder and I.”
Queries emailed by Mint to Netflix remained unanswered till press time.
Varun Mayya, 32, provides content and marketing courses through his agency Aeos Media. In the past year, the firm has offered AI video creation training and consultancy services to Godrej Properties, Amazon Prime Video and two major media conglomerates, among others, he said.
Godrej Properties and Amazon have yet to respond to Mint’s emailed queries.
“Our multi-week AI training programmes can extend up to ₹15 lakh for an internal corporate session, depending on the number of attendees and what is expected from us,” Mayya said. “We only stick to our area of expertise in AI training—AI content generation and marketing.”
Creators and consultants say the demand for AI upskilling is here to stay. “We’re only just discovering AI, and the field itself is actively evolving. Going forward, demand for education is certain to sustain for long—and those making the early moves can either delve deeper to offer greater expertise and certification in the long run,” said 100xEngineers’ Ramesh.
According to Kompella, CXOs “are only beginning to realize that understanding AI is imperative, and it is better done sooner than later”.
Surface-level training
There is, however, some scepticism. Jibu Elias, India head for responsible computing at Mozilla, said the generative AI hype is driving corporate leaders to AI training and many courses largely skim the “surface level usage of commercial tools”.
“Tech companies also have vested interests in getting future users familiarised with their ecosystems early on—we’ve seen this playbook before,” said Elias. “But, what we’re likely to see going forward is a shift from basic tool-training toward deeper education in context-specific AI reasoning, ethical judgment, and system integration. The role of the AI trainer isn’t disappearing, but it will need to evolve just as fast as the tools themselves.”
Mehra of The Cutting Edge School, however, does not expect demand for corporate AI trainers to cool anytime soon.
“In most of our training courses, we see that established corporate employees are still sketchy on the best ways to use AI,” he said. “As long as the field of AI keeps evolving, those on the cutting-edge of the technology will always find demand from larger corporations, seeking help with upskilling their workforce.”
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