India’s Data & AI Talent: 2020 → 2025, What Really Changed

The market exploded. In 2020, India’s analytics hiring was still “post-pandemic cautious.” By 2025, India’s AI market is on track for $17B by 2027 (25–35% CAGR) and houses ~420,000+ AI roles already—fueling a multi-year talent super-cycle. - Reuters

Global Capability Centres shifted from support to product/AI/R&D, with India’s GCC market projected at $99–$105B by 2030 and 2.5–2.8M jobs, pulling sustained demand for data engineering, ML, and platform talent - Reuters

AI/ML hiring surged 25% year-over-year in May 2025 alone, while the broader IT sector declined 5% - Economic Times

Data science jobs in India have risen by approximately 50% since 2020, creating over 14,000 active positions in tech hubs like Hyderabad alone. - Multiple sources

India’s AI talent base is projected to double to ~1.25M by 2027, yet GenAI created a fresh crunch: only ~1 qualified engineer for every 10 open GenAI roles in 2025, a stark supply–demand gap. - Economic times

2020 hiring centered on Python, SQL, BI, and classical ML. By 2025, demand tilts to LLMs, RAG, vector databases, MLOps/DataOps, and cloud-native data engineering—with mid-career talent (2–7 yrs) the hottest cohort. - AIM

India leads the world in GenAI course enrolments on Coursera, yet ranks ~89th on overall proficiency—evidence that velocity of learning hasn’t fully converted into mastery inside firms. - ETCIO

Generative AI Mastery Has Become Essential: For every 10 open GenAI roles, only one qualified engineer is currently available. The most in-demand skills include prompt engineering, LLM safety and tuning, AI orchestration, agent design, and AI compliance operations. - Economic Times, StoryBoard18

Cloud-Native Architecture Is Table Stakes: With 85% of organizations relying on cloud platforms for data workloads , professionals without cloud expertise face severe career limitations. - DataMites

Domain-Specific AI Specialization: The market has shifted toward domain experts comprising 57.7% of ML roles , moving away from generalist approaches toward deep industry-specific expertise. - 365DataScience

Hyderabad emerges as a key growth hub with projected 26% growth in data science jobs by 2026 and 50% role growth expected by 2027. - Datamites

Emerging Roles:
- AI Ethics and Governance
- MLOps and Production AI
- Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG)
- Industry-Specific AI Models
- AI Architects
- AI Strategists
- Robotics and Automation

The evolution from 2020 to 2025 has been extraordinary. The transformation from 2025 to 2030 will be at scale. India's data and AI professionals who position themselves now for next-generation roles will lead it on the global stage.