AI hiring surges 59.5 pc in India as Hyderabad emerges as key talent hub

AI hiring in India has risen 59.5 per cent year-on-year, with Hyderabad recording over 51 per cent growth, according to LinkedIn. Demand is expanding beyond Bengaluru as companies adopt AI, creating strong opportunities across tier-2 and tier-3 cities.

Hyderabad: Amid global layoffs across multinational companies, there is a huge demand for Artificial Intelligence (AI) professionals in the country as the companies continue to adopt AI across all divisions.
Hiring for AI talent in India has grown 59.5 percent year-on-year, according to LinkedIn’s new AI Labor Market Report 2026. While Bengaluru continues to lead as a global AI hub, the report highlighted a shift in hiring momentum for AI talent.

Cities such as Hyderabad with over 51 percent and Vijayawada with over 45.5 percent have witnessed strong growth in AI engineering hiring, signalling a broader spread of opportunities across tier-2 and tier-3 markets.

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Large enterprises continue to lead employing the highest share of AI talent as they invest in infrastructure, governance, and large-scale deployment. Smaller and mid-sized businesses are also catching up quickly.

AI talent supply is also expanding across industries as adoption deepens. In manufacturing, AI engineering talent has expanded 4 times in India reaching 2.0 percent in 2025.

Skills such as AI Agents, AI Productivity, Azure AI Studio, Intelligent Agents, and Automated Feature Engineering have strong demand in the SMB sector, indicating capabilities that professionals must invest in to future-proof their careers. In industries such as manufacturing, AI Agents and AI Prompting are emerging as critical skills to strengthen employability.

LinkedIn India Engineering head Malai Lakshmanan said they are seeing strong growth in applied AI skills such as AI agents and productivity tools, which are directly tied to real-world deployment.

“For engineers, this is a clear signal to focus on building practical, hands-on capabilities and integrating AI into everyday workflows. As adoption accelerates across industries and organisations of all sizes, those who can move from experimentation to execution will be best positioned to capture the opportunity,” he said.

Sharing tips, Lakshmanan advised engineers to focus on developing skills in fast-growing areas such as AI tools, data, and applied problem-solving that employers are increasingly demanding. He also advised engineers to prioritise roles where their skills align closely with the job’s requirements, and use AI tools to assess their fit upfront.