India’s AI playbook: From talent incubator to AI leader
Bottom lines up front
- India has adopted a proactive, use-case-driven AI strategy focusing on sectors like education, healthcare, energy, agriculture, and financial services, aiming to democratize access to AI and integrate informal workers into the Fourth Industrial Revolution.
- India’s AI talent ecosystem is rapidly growing, supported by government skilling programs, university integration, and industry partnerships, but faces structural gaps.
- While the country is a top STEM talent exporter, facing high brain drain to developed Western economies, recent policy measures aim to retain and attract talent.
Introduction
The successful adoption of artificial intelligence (AI) has become an axis of national power, crucial not just for the commercial success of companies but for economic progress, national resilience, and the livelihoods of citizens. Talent in the form of technical skills for building and deploying AI models, as well as for incorporating AI in processes in a way that makes them more accessible and useful, is a keystone of national competitiveness in AI.
India offers an instructive model. Home to the world’s largest English-speaking STEM (science, technology, engineering, and math) talent pool and a deliberate government-led AI strategy, India has moved from being a passive adopter of AI to an active participant in the technology, proactively investing in homegrown large language models (LLMs) and use cases for its citizens.
The dual challenges of AI talent development and workforce transition are urgent for India, which overtook China to become the world’s most populous country in 2023. India’s information technology (IT) sector experienced its first boom in the 1990s through the early 2000s, bolstered by economic liberalization policies, demand for labor resulting from the Y2K bug, and, later, immigration reforms in the United States that capped the number of H1B workers. The sector has since become aspirational for Indians seeking upward economic mobility. AI presents opportunities for growth in this area but also threatens to upend the established model of service-sector growth if either the workforce is not sufficiently equipped with skills to use AI effectively or industry is not poised to absorb this new AI workforce.
This report, “India’s AI Talent Playbook,” based on an event of the same name hosted by the Atlantic Council on January 23, 2026, assesses India against a framework of a robust AI talent ecosystem and distills evidence-based lessons from India’s approach that other emerging economies can adapt, with attention to both India’s successes and the structural gaps it has yet to close.
About the author
Trisha Ray is an associate director and resident fellow at the Atlantic Council’s GeoTech Center.
Acknowledgements
This project was made possible with the support of the Embassy of India in Washington, DC.
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