Can AI skills push India’s digital economy to $1.2 trillion by 2030?

The digital economy of India is estimated to reach $1.2 trillion by 2029–30, and AI capabilities will be the driving force behind the next growth phase, according to the report from Team Lease Digital.

As per the report, India’s artificial intelligence market is estimated to reach up to $17 billion by 2027. The number of AI professionals in the country is also expected to grow significantly, with the total talent pool approaching 1.25 million. The latter would represent around 16 per cent of the global AI talent pool.

The report attributes this growth to various factors like enterprise AI, national digital infrastructure, and quality STEM pipeline, among others. It further states that high-value AI roles are rapidly extending while the demand for traditional roles is stagnating.

High-paying enterprise AI skills to watch next year

The firm has identified six ‘enterprise-grade AI skills’ which are likely to be viewed as the foundational skills in 2026. These include Simulation Governance with a potential salary of Rs 26–35 LPA, Agent Design with a median salary range of Rs 25–32 LPA, AI Orchestration (Rs 24–30 LPA), Prompt Engineering (Rs 22–28 LPA), LLM Safety and Tuning (Rs 20–26 LPA), and AI Compliance and Risk Operations (Rs 18–24 LPA).

In the world market, up to 40 per cent of the workforce will be affected by AI in some way, with the areas most impacted being IT services, healthcare, BFSI, and customer experience.

The report highlighted that companies around the world are pivoting to view AI skill acquisition as an enterprise-wide priority, not only in data science but also in the areas of leadership, operations, risk, and compliance, and consequently, broad-based upskilling and hybrid human–AI workflows are taking place everywhere.

The report noted that the enterprise-grade AI skills that allow for governance, trust, orchestration, and scalability are the most wanted ones, not the AI skills for generic roles.

The demand for such skills is mostly in the cities of Bengaluru, Hyderabad, and Pune, where the existence of global capability centres, AI-first startups and the presence of major companies in BFSI, healthcare, and manufacturing are the main factors contributing to this.

According to the report, the significance of mid-level professionals will increase as they will be able to connect applied AI with governance, orchestration, and business needs in the real world.