AI Engineering Jobs in India Grow 51% While IT Hiring Stalls

A big number from LinkedIn's new chief

On his first trip to India as LinkedIn's chief executive, Dan Shapero said AI engineering roles in the country are growing 51% a year. He made the claim in an interview with The Economic Times.1 He placed it inside a larger argument: India is becoming one of the main winners as AI reshapes the global workforce, and its share of overseas R&D hiring by US companies is climbing quickly.3 By LinkedIn's count, that share went from 27% in 2019 to 41% in 2025.1 Hiring for data-centre jobs has tripled over the past decade.1

India matters a great deal to LinkedIn. It is the company's second-largest market and its fastest-growing one, with more than 186 million members.3 Shapero took over as CEO in April 2026 after about 18 years at the company, most recently as chief operating officer.2 So this was a new chief executive speaking in a core market, and the upbeat tone fits that setting.

The 51% figure still holds up. LinkedIn's India country head, Kumaresh Pattabiraman, repeated it about ten days later at a Business Today event. He added that India accounts for 311,000 of the 2 million AI-related jobs created worldwide since 2023.7

Interest rates, not robots, says LinkedIn

The most notable part of Shapero's comments was about the wider slowdown. Global hiring is still weaker than before the pandemic, but he said LinkedIn's data points to higher interest rates as the main cause, not AI.1 That puts LinkedIn against the popular view that generative AI is already eating white-collar work.

From where LinkedIn sits, the argument makes sense. Expensive money slows hiring in every sector at once, while AI-related demand is pulling in a different direction. In India's tech market, AI roles are growing even as general IT hiring is flat or falling. That pattern fits a rate-driven slowdown with an AI boom running alongside it more than a story of AI replacing workers.

The argument has a limit, though. A slowdown caused by interest rates should reverse when rates fall. The changes now hitting Indian IT entry-level jobs look more lasting than that, as the data below shows.

The numbers mostly agree, with some gaps

The overall direction is consistent across sources, but the exact figures vary. LinkedIn's own April 2026 AI Labor Market Update put growth in Indian AI engineering job postings at 59.5% year on year. That was the fastest of the markets it studied, which also included the US, UK, France and Germany.9 One outlet noted that the 59.5% figure measures job postings, while the 51% figure comes from executive interviews. It warned that neither number shows AI is adding the same number of jobs across India's workforce.4

The city figures are also slightly inconsistent. In April, LinkedIn reported 51% growth in AI engineering hiring in Hyderabad and 45.5% in Vijayawada.10 By August, Pattabiraman was citing a 46% rise for Vijayawada.7 The gaps are small, but they show how platform numbers get rounded and passed around until they read like official statistics.

Other job platforms show the same trend at lower rates. Foundit counted 290,256 AI-linked roles posted in India in 2025 and projected 32% growth in 2026, to nearly 380,000.19 Naukri data cited by Reuters showed AI hiring inside India's IT sector up 16% year on year in June 2026, while overall IT recruitment fell 3%.17 By September, AI/ML hiring was up more than 20% on the year, traditional IT and software jobs were down 4%, and overall white-collar hiring rose only 2%.15

The best reading is that AI demand in India is real and rising fast. The exact rate depends on how a platform defines an AI role and whether it counts postings or hires. LinkedIn's figures are at the high end of the range.

Skills are changing faster than job titles

For workplace adoption, the 51% headline may matter less than the slower change happening inside existing jobs. Shapero said the skills needed for a typical job in India are changing by about 12% a year, even when the job title stays the same.1 One summary of the interview said the churn is heaviest in finance, marketing, sales and legal.2 Pattabiraman went further. He said LinkedIn expects 75% of job skills in India to change by 2030, and gave social media managers as an example of a role whose title is unchanged but whose daily tools are now built around AI.8

He described the shift in terms of tasks. Some parts of each job will be automated, some will be made better by AI, and some will stay human, and he expects the human parts to become more valuable.7 Microsoft's 2026 data on Indian workers points the same way. It found that 32% of Indian AI users qualified as "Frontier Professionals" who use AI agents for multi-step work, twice the global average.17

AI is also changing how people get hired. Pattabiraman said AI agents now let candidates flood recruiters with hundreds or thousands of applications within hours, so résumés start to look alike.8 He cited LinkedIn data showing 46% of recruiters now use skills to make hiring decisions.7 LinkedIn is selling into that problem. Shapero said the company's agentic Talent Solutions products, including a Hiring Assistant launched less than a year ago, have passed a $450 million annual revenue run rate.1 That commercial interest is worth keeping in mind. A company that profits from AI-driven hiring tools has a reason to present AI disruption as an opportunity.

Entry-level workers are bearing the cost

While LinkedIn focuses on growth, other analyses show who is paying for the transition. Nomura found that AI-linked hiring in India has outpaced AI-related job losses by more than 51,000, a net gain. It also said AI is creating a two-tier labour market, with weaker demand for junior staff and steadier demand for experienced workers.18 Nomura cited Xpheno's estimate that net hiring by Indian IT companies fell from 600,000 in FY22 to 140,000 in FY26, mostly because firms cut campus recruitment rather than laying people off.18

CNBC's reporting is more worrying. An analyst there said net hiring by India's top five IT companies fell by about 7,000 in the year to March 2026. Economists warned that the IT sector, which supports the consumption of India's aspiring middle class, may stop producing the quality jobs the economy relies on.20 Oxford Economics said the core problem is that much of the workforce lacks the skills to move into roles that work alongside AI, and pointed to weak overall education outcomes.20 Cognizant's AI transformation programme reportedly includes job cuts as well as reskilling.20

The latest monthly data supports this. In September, hiring for people with 0 to 3 years of experience grew just 1%, while hiring for those with 13 to 15 years rose 7%.15

Our reading

Shapero's figure is accurate as far as it goes, and it is backed by LinkedIn's own reports and in part by other platforms. But it describes a fast-growing segment, not the whole labour market. India is gaining high-value AI and R&D work, some of it moving to cities like Vijayawada. At the same time it is losing the large entry-level hiring pipeline that turned engineering graduates into a middle class. Both things are true at once, and the best-case and worst-case accounts each leave out half of the picture.

Shapero said the biggest risk for workers and companies is not AI itself but failing to adapt to it.1 That advice is easiest to follow for experienced, well-connected professionals. The real test for India is whether its education system and employers can turn hundreds of thousands of new AI roles into a path for millions of graduates who now find fewer entry-level openings. The interest-rate explanation may account for the global slowdown. It does not account for the shrinking first rung of India's career ladder.