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Mumbai/New Delhi: If you have ‘AI engineering’ in your résumé, your odds of getting hired—despite the ongoing slowdown in India’s top IT services firms—are significantly higher, and so is the pay. This holds true even for non-tech roles, or when companies are hiring more for optics than necessity, simply to showcase AI capabilities in their workforce.
Data analysed by Mint from three staffing research and analysis firms—Careernet, Naukri and Xpheno—showed this singular leaning towards artificial intelligence or AI in enterprises’ hunt for the right candidate.
Having ‘AI engineering’ and related skills such as generative AI on profiles can increase the chances of getting a job by 20-80%. Salaries can also be expected to be higher by up to 13% in specific technology roles, and a whopping 64% in non-tech roles.
The trend holds firm even at global big tech companies, which are ramping up efforts to dominate AI in the decades to come. At Google, over 40% of 475 open roles in India are linked to AI. In Microsoft, 60% of its 228 open roles in India are about AI, data from their respective websites showed.
Recruiters and AI observers are not surprised, even if the rapidly growing technology is still at a nascent stage in the country.
“In niche areas, demand for AI skills is up 70-80%, while in generic skills, the mandate is up 40-50%,” said Satish Manne, partner at staffing consultant Xpheno. “The projects that companies are working on requiring AI are up by 20-25%, but their dependence and reliance on the external market is driving them to hire resources with AI knowledge—thereby shooting up the demand for AI.”
Take Himanshu Kohli, a 35-year-old mid-career engineer with a Big Tech firm in Seattle, US. According to Kohli, “there is only demand for AI engineers, that too at a higher level”, in the US—a big ground of jobs for Indian tech graduates migrating abroad. “There is demand, but for sharper skills; no one is currently recruiting for roles that are capable of being taken care of by AI itself, such as basic coding,” Kohli said.
Kashyap Kompella, AI author, analyst and founding consultant of tech research firm RPA2AI, said that companies are “willing to pay hefty premiums for candidates who hold Ph.D degrees in applied AI, or have proven themselves in AI applications roles. There are also engineers who go through basic upskilling, and would finding uptake in various roles”.
This is increasingly explaining the salary disparity as well. Data shared with Mint by job portal Naukri showed that the pay gap between ‘with’ and ‘without’ AI skills is 13%. In non-tech roles, this gap goes up to 64%.
The agency further added 39% growth is observed in the number of AI mandates between May 2023 and May 2025. And the share of AI jobs in all jobs has grown from 3.87% to 5.67% in the same period.
Even as AI jobs increase on the basis of real demand, a fear of missing the bandwagon is also at play. According to a senior recruitment manager at one of the top four IT services firms, who spoke on condition of anonymity, “there is a sense of panic among clients that if a service integrator does not have enough AI engineers, they are behind the curve”.
“It’s not always necessary that an ‘AI engineer’ does something drastically different from a typical software development executive with five to eight years of experience, but there is a clear need for firms to label roles keeping AI in mind—considerably so for the optics in question,” the manager said.
Kompella agreed, but said that instead of such masking of roles coming under AI, “such a thing can be beneficial for India as building up scale in AI services is more attainable than foundational research roles. But only core AI roles will fetch a premium in the long run”.
Xpheno’s Manne added that among industries leading this surge are banking and financial services, healthcare, and communications and media. Here, executives too are upskilling at scale in the hope of not facing the axe, and drawing better packages in the long run. “Profiles with four to 10 years of experience are seeing a surge in AI skills, having worked in relevant projects before,” he said.
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