Fierce AI talent war shifts to India with salaries being doubled

Aditya Chopra is not looking for a new job, but recruiters keep calling him anyway. The 36-year-old data-science specialist works in artificial intelligence (AI), perhaps the most coveted experience on the planet after OpenAI demonstrated the breakthroughs of ChatGPT.

Chopra, who works outside New Delhi, sees friends in the field get pay hikes of 35 per cent to 50 per cent each time they switch jobs. “There’s a real shortage of data and AI talent,” he said.

An AI hiring frenzy is ricocheting around the world, from Silicon Valley to Europe, Asia and beyond. While tech giants like Google and Baidu dangle top-notch packages for the engineers to build their own AI engines, companies in almost every other field – from healthcare and finance to entertainment – are staffing up too, to avoid getting blindsided by shifts in their industries.

India, perhaps more than any other country, illustrates how the rush for talent is outstripping supply. The country of 1.4 billion people has long been the back office for the tech industry, a source of reinforcements for any emergency. But now even the world’s most populous nation is running out of the data scientists, machine-learning specialists and skilled engineers that companies are looking for.

There’s an “insatiable need for talent,” said Rahul Shah, co-founder of WalkWater Talent Advisors, a headhunter for top-level workers. “AI can’t be outsourced, it’s core to the organisation.”

Recruitment stories verge on the absurd. In one search Shah’s firm just handled, the new employer more than doubled a candidate’s pay. Freedom Dumlao, chief technology officer of Flexcar, interviewed one engineer who said a rival suitor had offered him a BMW motorcycle as a sign-on bonus. “That’s a line I’m not comfortable approaching,” Dumlao said.

India’s tech industry is built on a plentiful supply of affordable workers. Companies like Tata Consultancy Services invented the model for modern outsourcing, in which Western companies tap engineers halfway around the world to handle support, services and software, typically at a fraction of the cost of local workers. There are now more than five million people employed in tech services in India, according to the trade group Nasscom.

Powerhouses like Google, Microsoft and Amazon set up their own operations in India, hiring locals by the thousands. Google, now part of Alphabet, started with five employees in the country in 2004 and now employs nearly 10,000.