India leads in AI skilling boom, even as concerns around job automation persist.

Bengaluru: India is seeing the largest amount of artificial intelligence (AI) skilling in India, according to Coursera’s managing director for India and Asia Pacific, Raghav Gupta. “We’ve seen a lot of good momentum, whether it’s an individual coming to learn or its companies saying we want to invest in this space,” he said while speaking in a panel discussion at the Mint AI Summit 2025.

Gupta alongside Adecco Group’s India country manager Sunil Chemmankotil, RPA2AI Research chief executive officer Kashyap Kompella, and upGrad Enterprise president Neeraj Gera were part of a panel discussion at the summit on whether AI will take away jobs.

A report from the Edelman Trust Institute points out that 68% of Indians are comfortable with businesses using AI, compared to Western nations like the US (32%), Germany (31%), and Australia (27%).

That can be explained by the faith that Indians have in the technology. Trust in the technology stands at 77% in the nation, followed by 76% in Nigeria, 73% in Thailand and 72% in China, according to Edelman’s report. By comparison, faith in AI is significantly lower in developed nations like the US (32%), Germany (29%) and Australia (25%).

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Adecco Group’s surveys have showed that AI is being actively discussed in boardrooms across almost all companies in India. “We should be happy that there is a discussion happening and people are looking at how to do proof-of-concept, how to utilize AI and improve productivity, and safeguard employees’ jobs,” Chemmankotil said.

It is something that the World Economic Forum has pointed out as well in its Future of Jobs Report, 2025. Both India and the US are leaders when it comes to demand for generative AI training, both as individuals and as enterprises. Individuals focus on foundational genAI skills and conceptual topics. Meanwhile, in enterprise, learners are picking up courses geared towards practical applications in the workplace, leveraging AI tools to enhance efficiency or even using the technology to develop applications.

While integration of AI into a company’s workforce is driven by leadership, it is the rank and file that are crucial in ensuring proper execution. Coursera, for example, hasn’t increased the size of their customer service team in the past two years. “The work they’re [sales team] able to do has gone up maybe six or eight times because that team is actively using AI capabilities. That team has been given training on using generative AI,” Gupta said.

Jobs at risk

But with this faith in the technology also come concerns from white collar workers that they will be replaced by AI in their jobs. A 2024 report from IIM Ahmedabad shows that 68% of white-collar workers in India are concerned that their work will be either partially or completely automated within the next five years. “The sense we got in our last survey is that people are very worried, there is a lot of confusion,” said Chemmankotil.

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Macrotrend data analyzed by the WEF shows that by 2030, there will be 170 million jobs created, with 92 million jobs being displaced, resulting in net growth of 78 million new jobs.

Kompella of RPA2AI Research has his own way of looking at it, what he calls the “4C framework”. He suggests four sectors related to knowledge-based jobs are going to be impacted in India. The 4Cs are content and marketing, customer service and support, coding and, finally, consulting.

“We’re underestimating the transition risk,” Kompella said, adding that an economist’s perspective on job creation in India is missing when it comes to skilling people on AI.

Questions like, for each job lost, how many would be created, or what is the time delay between jobs being transformed and new ones popping up, remain unanswered. Kompella suggested that India should have an AI readiness mission “with a focus on jobs and the impact on jobs”.

A policy approach

The proliferation of AI and its impact on jobs has gained enough significance that there was an entire section of the Economic Survey 2024-2025 dedicated to addressing employment challenges down the line. But the question boils down to whether the government needs to step in to address AI skilling and employment, or is it something that can be led by the private sector?

“While there could be net new jobs, the challenge for a country like ours is that there is still a displacement of jobs,” said upGrad Enterprise’s Gera. He said that the government had an active role to play in getting workers skills up to par.

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“I do think we need some amount of intervention, and this is more at a higher education level, because all the talent that is coming into the industry is something we need to think about as well,” said Coursera’s Gupta. Explaining the rationale, he said that many students going through higher education are not receiving the kind of education that they need to receive.

The challenge according to Gupta is, “How do you bring policy that is able to bring AI and generative AI education to colleges and universities who don’t have the ability to provide that education as well?”