Demand For Agentic AI Talent Rises 260% As Enterprises Embrace AI: Report

As AI moves from experimentation to mainstream enterprise use, the demand for Agentic AI engineers in India has soared 260% year-on-year in 2026, a report said on Tuesday.

Demand for Agentic AI engineers grew 260% in 2026 compared to last year, the highest growth among the emerging roles tracked, according to a report by HR solutions provider CIEL HR.

GenAI solutions architects and AI product owners recorded 120% growth each, and LLM engineers and MLOps engineers saw demand rise by 86.5% and 82.2%, respectively.

The report is based on a broad labour market intelligence base covering over 450 million job postings, more than 30 million professional profiles and over 10,000 mapped skills data from March 2024 to May 2026.

The report further revealed that AI is taking on a significant share of workloads within routine technology functions, handling up to 70% of the workload involved in ticket resolution and report generation, and 65% of the workload in test case creation.

This places support, reporting, and manual quality assurance among the technology functions with the highest potential for task-level automation, while the remaining workload continues to require human involvement, the report noted.

"AI is changing the value attached to different technology skills. We are seeing routine activities become increasingly automated, while demand is growing for people who can build, integrate and govern AI in real business environments.

"The opportunity for organisations is to look at this as a workforce transition, identifying where technology can take on repetitive work while building the skills needed for the next phase of growth," CIEL HR MD and CEO Aditya Narayan Mishra said.

The changing technology demand is also prompting organisations to strengthen internal talent pipelines, according to the report.

IT services organisations are responding to the shift by expanding AI-focused training and role-based reskilling programmes, including cloud academies, hyperscaler certification pathways, enterprise AI initiatives and structured early-career talent programmes, while bringing existing talent into these initiatives to build capabilities aligned with evolving business demand.

Generative AI engineering, AI/ML, cloud engineering, cloud transformation, cybersecurity, data engineering and automation are emerging as key capability areas where organisations are looking to build talent.

Market-level skill gaps across AI, cloud and cybersecurity range from 38-61%, increasing the need for organisations to develop talent alongside external hiring, the report added.