India Races Ahead In AI Talent, But Public Trust Is Slipping

Stanford University’s latest AI Index Report shows India leading in AI hiring growth. The hiring data in the AI Index comes from LinkedIn, which tracks job and skill trends across its 1+ billion users. 

A LinkedIn member is considered to have AI talent if they have explicitly added AI skills to their profile, work or have worked in AI, says the Stanford report.

Moreover, India is second only to the US in AI skill penetration and open-source AI project contributions on GitHub. GitHub is a platform for developers to upload, share and manage their open-source models or software. Since 2016, India’s AI talent pool has grown by over 250 per cent, the highest of any country studied.

These statistics mean well for India, but for a country so bullish on building AI capacity, its people are oddly becoming more skeptical of AI’s impact in their lives. Between 2022 and 2024, the share of Indians who believed that AI will significantly change their lives in the near future actually dropped, as per the Ipsos data of those years.

This came at a time when most other countries, including historically skeptical ones like France and Germany, reported growing optimism. This trust gap raises uncomfortable questions. Are people seeing more hype than help? 

The gender gap in AI persists globally. The Stanford report, however, says that India stands out for relatively higher AI skill penetration among women, one of the few bright spots in an otherwise uneven global trend.

The Race For A Foundational Model

The report notes that between 2013 and 2023, the number of AI publications in computer science and other scientific disciplines nearly tripled, increasing from approximately 1,02,000 to over 2,42,000. China remains at the forefront of AI research, contributing 23.2 per cent of global AI article publications in 2023, well ahead of Europe at 15.2 per cent and India at 9.2 per cent.

Unlike China, which leads in academic AI publications and is fast becoming a hardware powerhouse, the report concludes that India’s AI push appears focused more on servicing global demand than shaping foundational AI systems of its own.

To close the gap, the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology (MeitY) has invited startups and researchers to submit their proposals for foundation models and train them on Indian datasets. The proposals selected by the ministry will thus get funding from the government.

This follows neighbouring countries like China developing DeepSeek earlier this year using limited GPUs and funding, challenging the notion that training AI requires massive budgets and extensive time.

India is producing the engineers, and is on the path to build an ecosystem at home. Indian students even dominate computer science (CS) programmes in the US, making up over 72,000 of international CS master’s students in 2022.

However, much of this talent remains overseas, as The Secretariat had reported last year. Without serious investment in public-facing applications, the country risks becoming an AI factory for the world.

(This is the first of a two-part series on India's AI outlook as reported in Stanford University's AI Index Report 2025)