Mumbai’s AI hiring outpaces supply at 15% job posts vs 8% talent; Bengaluru tops with 29% share

Also, read: India’s GCCs power 22.5% of AI demand, cement 1.26 lakh talent base

Status Check: Delhi-NCR, Hyderabad

Beyond the two largest hubs, Delhi-NCR, which holds 18 percent of India’s AI talent and 12 percent of job postings, shows a relatively balanced market. The region is seeing rising demand from banks, fintech players, telcos, and government-linked digital programs.

Delhi-NCR’s strength in fraud analytics, credit modelling, and governance-heavy AI use cases is driving steady hiring, but the supply pool is tightening as more GCCs in BFSI and telecom consolidate advanced data engineering and model risk teams in the region.

Hyderabad, with 12 percent of talent and 12 percent of AI job posts, reflects one of India’s most stable supply-demand equations. The city’s ecosystem, boosted by cloud hyperscalers, semiconductor firms, and enterprise tech GCCs, has created a strong pipeline for platform engineering, LLMOps, and multimodal AI roles.

Demand continues to grow, but Hyderabad’s talent density and steady inflow of specialised engineers keep the gap narrower than in Mumbai or Pune.

Also, read: Maharashtra sets out plan to outpace southern states in GCC investments

GCCs drive India’s AI demand, specialist roles tighten

The report shows that GCCs now account for 22.5 percent of India’s AI talent demand, with 126,600 professionals engaged in AI-driven functions across Fortune 500 centers.

Of these, 18,300 occupy core AI roles, including ML engineering, LLMOps, AI product management, and Gen AI development.

“There is a great need to actually increase and upskill the level of specialists that exist within anything AI,” he said. GCCs, he added, must first strengthen internal infrastructure before scaling deeper AI systems, especially in areas like security, privacy, and responsible AI governance.

Upskilling accelerates as AI talent gap grows

India’s AI talent gap, projected at over one million workers, could be closed through internal reallocation of software, data, and cloud professionals, the report reveals.

Ahuja said this shift is underway as there is a significant reallocation happening with the internal talent… “organisations are investing in upskilling initiatives that allow their current workforce to take advantage of these opportunities.”

He added that lateral hiring will continue, but will run in parallel with internal mobility.

“I don’t think it'll be an either-or… the entire organisation is at some level expected to be AI-enabled,” Ahuja said.

Also, read: Indian GCCs retrain staff as AI engineers to combat talent shortage

Tier-2 expansion supplements metro talent

While non-metro hubs now account for 15 percent of India’s AI talent and are gaining traction in DataOps, cybersecurity, and DevOps roles, Ahuja cautioned against seeing this as a shift away from metros.

“Tier 2 cities are not going to take away market share; they're going to add to the market share of the overall industry,” he said.

Moreover, emerging competencies in specialised domains are supported by state-backed training programs.