AI-based Jobs Rise Across Sectors, 71% of White-Collar Employees Using AI: Indeed India MD

There has been a rise in roles demanding some sort of artificial intelligence capability across sectors, with an 11% increase in mentions of AI in job descriptions themselves, said Sashi Kumar, Managing Director of Indeed India. Adding to that, almost 71% of all white-collar employees in India reported that they are using AI in some shape or form for their jobs, for their day-to-day work today.

In an interview with Outlook Business, he also noted that many Indian companies that are in the product space and global capability centres (GCCs) operated by multinational companies are doing “some pretty deep work involving AI using some of the latest technologies.”

Data provided by the online jobs platform show that artificial intelligence opportunities, while still concentrated in the tech sector, are increasingly visible across non-tech industries as well.

In India, 39% of data and analytics roles now mention artificial intelligence, the highest share among job categories, followed by software development at 23%, insurance at 18%, and scientific research at 17%. AI demand is also spreading across engineering disciplines, with industrial engineering at 17%, mechanical engineering at 11% and electrical engineering at 9.2%. Mentions of generative AI also continue to rise, with 1.5% of all job postings in India referencing it as of May 2025, a figure that has doubled since 2024.

Karnataka (2.4%) and Telangana (2.3%) have emerged as leading regional hubs for AI-related jobs, as per the Indeed data. Despite a slight dip in software development roles, the sector remains the largest, accounting for one in five job postings on Indeed India. Additionally, talent flow is increasingly shifting to Tier 2 and Tier 3 cities, reflecting the broader geographic spread of AI opportunities.

The shift comes as Indian IT companies and global capability centres (GCCs) set up by foreign companies try to leverage AI into their products and services to gain productivity improvements and open new avenues of revenue. Earlier, Outlook Business reported that enterprises are ready to pay as much as ₹60 lakh per annum for senior roles related to fields like AI/GenAI, cloud, data engineering, and cybersecurity, but there is a 40% to 53% talent gap.

Kumar says that “there will always be a talent gap, but what is interesting is that many employers are today pivoting to something called skills-based hiring to work up.”

“Employers are working backwards, figuring out what skills are relevant for doing that specific job and looking to hire for those skills so that people can get trained in using some of the newest available AI agents, etc. There is a talent gap. What many companies are doing is resorting to skills-based hiring so that they are able to widen the talent pool,” he added.

Employers Pushing AI Use

While employees are increasingly using AI tools in some form, the push is also coming from the employer side as well, indicating lower stigma around AI use.

“Companies are encouraging people to use AI to simplify tasks, not for anything else, because it boosts productivity,” noted Sashi Kumar, adding that a lot of companies and employees are cognisant that AI is not the end of everything.

“You still need to add the human touch. You still need to make it more human,” Kumar added.

The Indeed India MD also noted that a lot of layoffs in 2025 came from “companies increasingly adopting technology, specifically AI, which is impacting the kind of roles that exist.”

He claimed it was “more of a recalibration of what is available and what companies want to focus on hiring.”

“Many companies are very optimistic about their hiring numbers in the coming year. It’s not like AI has come in and said, you know, 100 people were doing this task and now, because AI is here, 100 becomes zero. I don’t think that has happened. In the next four to five years, that’s unlikely. What we’ve seen is that for those tasks, people who are equipped with AI and technology to do the work better than their counterparts have been able to cope much better than those who have not adopted technology,” he explained.

Indeed is also using AI to improve job matching, with a key initiative being Career Scout, which uses AI to understand a job seeker’s interests, skills, and preferences, helping them discover suitable roles and identify skills they may need to strengthen. It has been launched globally and is expected to roll out in India soon. On the employer side, Indeed is offering Talent Scout, which applies similar AI-driven matching to surface the most relevant candidates for open roles.

Rising Manufacturing Jobs, but Few Takers

Indeed, which has been working in the Indian market for over a decade, added 310,000 new jobs on its platform each month between July and September 2025. Kumar noted that over the last five years, their traffic has grown by about 59% overall.

“We have a very strong dynamic across both job seekers and jobs. In 2020, five years ago, we used to add about 190,000 new jobs every month. That number has now gone up to around 290,000 to 300,000 jobs every month. There has also been a significant increase in the number of resumes added. We are now seeing about 800,000 resumes every month, which is almost double what it was around four years ago,” he noted.

He also noted that there has been a sharp rise in manufacturing jobs on the platform amid the government’s push in the sector, with several production-linked incentive (PLI) schemes and fiscal incentives for foreign companies to manufacture in India.

According to the Indeed Hiring Tracker, manufacturing hiring intent rose sharply by 80% year-on-year from FY25 to FY26, with the sector accounting for 37% of all employer hiring intentions in FY25.

Hiring activity spans both white-collar and blue-collar roles, though employee preferences continue to lag employer demand, according to Indeed.

Only 13% of employees chose production and manufacturing as their preferred domain in FY24, highlighting a persistent demand–supply mismatch. Blue-collar roles dominate hiring demand, driven largely by shop-floor, production, and operations roles across FY24 to FY26. Meanwhile, white-collar hiring remains selective but steady, with demand focused on areas such as quality control, supply chain, plant management, engineering, and process optimisation.