Overview

• The report forecasts the AI skills gap to widen to 53% by 2026, with cloud computing facing a 55–60% demand–supply mismatch.
• India’s AI market is projected to reach $28.8 billion by 2025 at a 45% CAGR, signaling sustained enterprise adoption.
• Pay is climbing fastest in specialist roles, with senior Generative AI and MLOps professionals earning about Rs 58–60 LPA and annual increases above 18%.
• GCCs are set to drive hiring, accounting for 22–25% of net new tech jobs in 2025 and creating over 1.2 million of 4.7 million new roles by 2027, with recruitment spreading into Tier-2 campuses and 130,000–140,000 freshers expected in FY25.
• Employers prize niche capabilities such as prompt engineering, LLM safety and tuning, orchestration and AI compliance, and the report cautions that deployments will stall without rapid upskilling.