New Delhi , 27th Oct.25: India stands at a pivotal juncture in its employment and technology journey. According to the NITI Aayog’s recently released Roadmap for Job Creation in the AI Economy, the country has the potential to generate up to 4 million new “AI-first” jobs in the next five years, even as certain routine roles may face disruption.
The report reveals that India’s technology and customer-experience (CX) sectors — currently valued at around USD 245 billion — are already undergoing major transformation due to increasing adoption of artificial intelligence (AI). While this presents a risk for roles such as QA engineers or Level-1 support agents, NITI Aayog emphasises that with strategic skilling and innovation, the change can instead become a massive job-creation opportunity.
Key findings
- The report projects that the demand for AI-talent in India will grow from roughly 800,000–850,000 today to over 1,250,000 by 2026 — a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of about 25 %.
- Without intervention, head-counts in certain segments of the tech services industry could shrink: one scenario suggests reductions from 7.5–8 million in 2023 down to about 6 million by 2031.
- To convert disruption into opportunity, the roadmap sets out three major pillars:
- Embedding AI literacy across schools, universities and vocational programmes.
- Building a national reskilling engine to upskill existing tech and CX professionals into higher-value AI-augmented roles.
- Positioning India as a global AI talent magnet — retaining domestic talent, attracting international experts, and establishing India as a premier destination for AI skilling and innovation.
The roadmap anticipates the emergence of a range of new roles: for example, AI Engineers, Machine Learning Engineers, Data Scientists and Data Engineers; also roles such as AI Ethics Specialists, Prompt Engineers, AI Trainers, and Human-AI Interaction Designers.
As Subrahmanyam, CEO of NITI Aayog, said: “India’s strength lies in its people. With over 9 million technology and customer experience professionals, and the world’s largest pool of young digital talent, we have both the scale and ambition. What we need now is urgency, vision, and coordination.” The report warns that delay in action could lead to job losses and reduced competitiveness in the global AI economy.
The findings point to several implications:
- Governments, industry and academia must coordinate to build an ecosystem of infrastructure (compute, data access), curriculum overhaul and talent pipelines.
- Businesses will need to rethink workforce strategies: shifting from routine tasks to roles that combine domain expertise with AI-augmented capabilities.
- For individuals, the emphasis is clear: reskilling into AI-relevant and hybrid roles may determine future employability.
- The opportunity is particularly strong for India: the scale of digital talent, large services base and favourable demographics give the country a chance to become a global AI hub rather than simply a job-losing scenario.
