India has a booming artificial intelligence sector—and it’s struggling to fill over 4,000 jobs

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• According to a study by Analytics India Magazine, India has nearly 4,000 vacant jobs in the Artificial Intelligence space because of lack of qualified talent.
  
• The study revealed that around 57% of companies are looking to hire candidates with an experience of over five years, while Indian working professionals have merely three years experience.
  
• Women headcount in AI workforce is significantly low, which is just 23% of the total employees.
  
• The net compensation in the sector has been ₹1.43 million across levels with nearly 40% having an entry-level salary starting at ₹600,000.

While the use of Artificial Intelligence is rapidly growing among industries, the emerging sector has nearly 4,000 vacant positions in India because of lack of qualified talent.

According to a study by Analytics India Magazine, in collaboration with Great Learning, nearly 57% of companies are looking for candidates with five years experience in the sector for mid-level and senior-level jobs. However, Indian professionals, on an average, have just three years of experience.

The study highlighted that the AI industry and machine intelligence have seen an upward trend, and a growth of about 30% over the last one year. However, the opportunities do not include new jobs in the sector, and are focussed on existing positions that have been vacant for over 12 months, according to the report.

In the artificial Intelligence domain, the employers mainly demand key skills such as machine learning natural language processing, neural networks, analytics, cloud computing and pattern recognition.

With such pace of growth and increasing demand for automation, the net compensation in this job sector has been fairly good at 1.43 million across levels with nearly 40% having an entry-level salary starting at 600,000.

While Bengaluru dominates the AI market in India at 32% of all AI working professionals, Delhi-NCR has 22%. However, Mumbai has the highest share of these professionals and is also the highest paymaster to AI professionals.

AI has been used by financial services companies, for example, for credit approvals and for predicting default rates, making processes faster and more accurate. However, there are also concerns that with advances in machines and growing technologies like artificial intelligence can potentially replace up to 75 million jobs by 2020.

The key AI trends have revealed that its potential has risen in the last few years. Currently, there are approximately 40,000 AI professionals in India. However, Women headcount in AI workforce is significantly low, which is just 23% of the total employees.

As machine learning has made Artificial Intelligence an integral part of the system, nearly 1,000 companies claim to work on this technology with chatbots being the most common example.

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