AI workforce tops 9.2 lakh as hiring priorities evolve

So India now has 9.2 lakh 'AI professionals' — a figure that sounds impressive until you learn that over 70% of them work in roles that have nothing to do with AI specialisation. That's like celebrating a football team's squad depth by counting the kit managers and physios. Quess Corp's report cheerfully notes that hiring demand has shifted 'from experimentation to execution,' which is corporate code for 'we've finished playing with the toy and now need someone to make it do something useful before the shareholders get twitchy.'

The numbers paint a picture of a workforce that's being rebranded rather than retrained. Every data entry clerk who now uses an auto-complete tool is suddenly an 'AI professional.' Every marketer who asks ChatGPT to write a tweet — boom, AI workforce. It's a brilliant statistical sleight of hand: if you define the term broadly enough, you can claim victory while the actual number of people building or aligning frontier models remains a rounding error.

One has to admire the timing. As Western tech companies announce their fourth round of layoffs this year, India's narrative is all about growth — even if that growth is mostly in the margins. The 'execution' phase they're so proud of will inevitably mean automating away many of those very roles. But why dwell on that when you can headline with 9.2 lakh? Pass the chai and the Kool-Aid.