India’s growing artificial intelligence workforce saw renewed momentum as ANSR released new findings on Tuesday. The report examined how GCC operations across major Indian cities expanded their AI hiring in 2024 and why these centres now anchor enterprise technology transformation efforts.
What changed in GCC hiring
The report found that GCC organisations captured 22.5% of India’s total AI talent demand. It also noted that these centres now employ more than 126,600 professionals in AI-aligned functions. Core AI specialists make up 18,300+ roles, including teams focused on machine learning, deep learning, LLM engineering, MLOps and GenAI platform development. GCC units also deploy five to six adjacently skilled engineers for each core AI role to support model development pipelines.
How India’s AI landscape evolved
India’s domestic AI workforce expanded by 252% between 2016 and 2024, and the growth rate is 2.51 times higher than the global average, the report said. The talent shift also reduced outbound migration among senior AI professionals. ANSR attributed this shift to large-scale GCC assignments, competitive salaries and exposure to global-grade technical problem statements.
Impact on cities and sectors
Bengaluru now hosts 30% of India’s AI workforce, establishing the country’s largest concentration of AI skills. Hyderabad recorded rapid gains as cloud majors such as AWS, Microsoft and Google strengthened CoEs in the city. Chennai and Pune advanced domain-specific AI adoption across BFSI, manufacturing and healthcare.
The road ahead for GCC AI capability building
ANSR Co-founder Vikram Ahuja said organisations will gain from building AI-ready capabilities and developing teams that can adopt responsible innovation models. The study, produced with Wizmatic, highlighted how GCC structures shifted from execution-only centres to innovation hubs.
The report said most mature GCC operations will run specialised units in areas such as agentic AI, multi-modal systems, LLM governance and AI-first platforms by 2030. These developments position India as a strategic global AI hub.
