AI skills drive higher salaries as recruiter demand surges across sectors.
Artificial intelligence (AI) skills now feature in 15.4% of technology job descriptions in India, up sharply from just 0.9% in 2020, marking a nearly 17-fold increase in employer demand over the past six years, according to the Naukri World AI Day Report 2026.
The report suggests that Indian enterprises have moved beyond experimenting with AI and are now hiring for specialised capabilities as they scale deployment across business functions. Drawing insights from nearly 27,000 professionals across more than 80 industries and over 15 cities, alongside an analysis of more than three lakh job descriptions, recruiter search behaviour and Naukri’s proprietary hiring data, the study highlights how AI is reshaping the country’s labour market.
Recruiter demand has increasingly shifted towards advanced AI capabilities. Searches for Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) skills rose 4.8 times year-on-year, while demand for Azure AI increased 2.9 times. Recruiter searches for Large Language Models (LLMs) grew 2.4 times, AI Solutions 2.1 times and Prompt Engineering 1.6 times compared with the previous year.
The report also found that hiring is becoming more role-specific. Recruiters are increasingly looking for AI Product Managers, AI Solution Architects, AI Automation Engineers, AI Platform Engineers and AI Trainers, signalling that organisations are embedding AI into core business operations rather than running pilot projects.
While hiring demand has surged, workforce readiness continues to lag. The survey found that 77% of professionals use AI at work, with 55% using it occasionally and 22% relying on it extensively. However, only 35% said they are receiving structured AI training from their employers. Around 23% are relying on self-learning to build AI capabilities, while another 21% are still waiting for formal organisational training, underscoring a growing gap between AI adoption and employee skilling.
The adoption of AI is also expanding beyond the technology sector. AI-related skills now appear in 1.59% of non-technology job descriptions, up from 0.26% in 2020, representing nearly six-fold growth over the period.
According to the report, professionals with AI skills command higher median salaries than peers without AI expertise across both IT and non-IT roles. AI-enabled roles have also registered stronger salary growth over the past four years, reflecting the increasing premium employers are placing on AI capabilities as adoption becomes more widespread.
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First Published onJuly 17, 2026, 10:36:51 IST
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