Kolkata: 

Though artificial intelligence (AI) has caught the fancy of many corporates, there is a woeful shortage of AI-trained manpower in India, consulting major BCG (Boston Consulting Group) has said in a report titled “The GenAI adoption conundrum”. The gap in demand and supply could be as high as 53% by the end of 2026. The BCG report has stated that “despite 83% of developers acknowledging GenAI’s productivity benefits, adoption remains stagnant at 39%, with GenZ adoption surprisingly lower at 31%”.

Boston Consulting Group has stated in the report that the US and China are the leading powers in AI. Next in the middle rung come countries such as Japan, South Korea, Saudi Arabia, UAE and the EU. “How Indian ITeS companies upskill their workforce and improve their productivity by adopting GenAI tools, will define whether we are able to register India’s name amongst the list of global GenAI leaders,” the consultancy firm observed.

BCG has said that India stands at a “critical inflection point in the GenAI revolution”. It went on to add, “While India dominates global outsourcing, a 51% skilled talent gap across next-gen skills like LLM fine-tuning, cloud computing, and cybersecurity threatens its leadership in the next wave of AI-driven innovation.”

Roadblocks and threats

The US-based consulting major has identified the roadblocks to the training to professionals in AI and it has also commented on what the threats are if the country fails to tackle the shortcoming urgently. “Key roadblocks include ineffective mass training, lack of scientific tracking, client skepticism, and integration challenges. Without addressing these challenges, India risks falling behind global AI leaders like the U.S. and China, while emerging AI middle powers—South Korea, Japan, and Saudi Arabia—gain ground,” BCG has said.

Less than one-third of companies have upskilled one-quarter of their workforce to use AI. That’s better than a year ago , but far from where companies need to be for workers to feel comfortable with such a job-threatening technology.

Deep specialists and broader workforce

Senior professionals at BCG has pin pointed the problem in the perspective of India Inc. “If we zoom out and look at the next five years, AI is going to penetrate every aspect of human work, whether personal or business-related. As a result, the required skill sets will encompass almost every traditional business function… First is the need for deep specialists in various AI-related domains; second, we need a broader workforce that can effectively use AI. The latter is the bigger challenge,” Tiger Tyagarajan, senior advisor at BCG was quoted in the media as saying.

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