Hiring of AI talent in India has grown 59.5% 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 highlights a shift in hiring momentum for AI talent. Cities such as Hyderabad (+51%) and Vijayawada (+45.5%) are seeing strong growth in AI engineering hiring, signalling a broader spread of opportunities across tier-2 and tier-3 markets.
The growth in AI engineering hiring is being driven by rapid AI adoption across organisations of all sizes. Large enterprises continue to lead by employing the highest share of AI talent as they invest in infrastructure, governance, and large-scale deployment. At the same time, smaller and mid-sized businesses are catching up quickly, serving as a bridge between early experimentation and enterprise-scale adoption. AI talent supply is also expanding across industries as AI adoption deepens. In manufacturing, AI engineering talent has expanded fourfold in India, reaching 2.0% in 2025.
Malai Lakshmanan, Head of Engineering at LinkedIn India, says, “We 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.”
Skills such as AI Agents, AI Productivity, Azure AI Studio, Intelligent Agents, and Automated Feature Engineering are seeing 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 for improving employability.
