As India embraces Artificial Intelligence, questions remain over how ready its talent pool is

A report by NASSCOM points out that India’s AI talent pool is projected to grow from present-day numbers of 600,000 to 650,000 to over 1.25 million by 2017. While this is a CAGR of 15%, it still isn’t rapid as the country’s AI market growth, which is registering a CAGR of 25 to 35% in this period.

“We really need to make sure we really come together as teams – be it from the industry, the academia and the government – to ensure our talent that comes out of universities has the right level of knowledge to work on real-life problems,” said Sindhu Gangadharan, Chairman at NASSCOM and MD of SAP Labs India, in a chat with CNBC-TV18.

Incidentally, the union budget has allocated ₹2,550 crore to set up three AI Centres of Excellence to ensure India is part of the global AI discourse. Further, the National AI Mission and National Supercomputing Mission have also been designed with the objective of creating a skilled, AI-ready workforce.

In the private sector, SAP Labs India has doubled its AI talent pool as it deploys its AI co-pilot, Joule, across its client base, while Zoho Corp is intensively skilling its talent in the area of AI language models. “I always believe it’s the job of entrepreneurs and companies to create those skills and not just say ‘we want ready-made skills from the market’,” said Zoho CEO Sridhar Vembu, “So, invest in skill and talent creation – that’s what we want to do in AI too.”

However, global names are buoyant about the promise that India holds. “Take healthcare or defence manufacturing – India has not been touched by technology too much in these sectors,” says Neeraj Arora, MD at General Catalyst, “I think we will completely leapfrog the rest of the world and we will be able to build real applications for billions of people in India, in these industries.”

Another key focus area for Indian AI growth is in the ‘agents’ segment. AI agents are software programs that can perform tasks autonomously with minimal or no human input at all. 

“We believe agent AI is the most important technology in the enterprise and business world in contrast to chat bots or co-pilots where they simply assist you,” said Valar Afshar, Chief Digital Evangelist at Salesforce, in a recent chat with CNBC-TV18.

SAP Labs India is also bullish about its recently launched AI Agents: “We are looking at use cases where you need to have multiple agents that traverse through different parts of processes while maintaining context and sync points between each other,” Sindhu added. 

Last month, Cisco announced a global AI fund of 1 billion dollars, even as Chairman and CEO Chuck Robbins acknowledged the country’s start-up boom. All that’s left is for India’s widely available human capital to get more AI-ready.

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