India IT firms boost AI hiring as broader recruitment falls

AI hiring in India’s information-technology sector rose 16% year on year in June even as overall IT recruitment fell 3%, widening the gap inside an industry still under pressure from cautious clients and automation. Naukri’s monthly JobSpeak report, which tracks newly added job listings from more than 150,000 firms, showed that employers were hiring, but in a narrower part of the market.

The strongest demand was concentrated in AI and machine-learning roles. Those jobs increased 25% across 14 sectors, with insurance and consumer goods posting the biggest gains. The numbers point to a labor market that is no longer expanding evenly across the technology stack. Generalist hiring is cooling, while roles tied to model building, deployment and AI-enabled operations are drawing more attention.

Hitesh Oberoi, chief executive of Info Edge, said the divergence shows where tech firms are still willing to invest, and that AI is becoming a core capability area as demand shifts toward more senior and specialized talent. That shift leaves fewer openings for the kind of broad-based volume hiring that once defined India’s tech services boom, while increasing the premium on workers who can design, integrate and manage AI systems inside client work.

Tata Consultancy Services chairman N. Chandrasekaran added a sharper warning for the sector’s labor model. He said IT companies expect to slow hiring as they move toward having roughly equal numbers of employees and AI agents. For an industry built on labor-intensive delivery, that signals a move toward automation-backed service models and a thinner pipeline of entry-level and mid-tier jobs.

The June figures also fit a pattern that was already visible earlier in the year. In April, Naukri said AI and machine-learning hiring was up 32% year on year while IT hiring was flat. In May, IT hiring fell 7% year on year even as AI/ML and insurance remained hiring leaders. NASSCOM’s 2026 Strategic Review projected India’s tech industry revenue at $315 billion in FY26, AI revenues at $10 billion to $12 billion, and about 135,000 net new jobs, taking total sector headcount to nearly 5.95 million. The sector is still adding jobs, but the evidence shows those gains are concentrating in specialist talent bets rather than broad expansion.