India Inc shifts AI hiring to applied skills
New Delhi: India Inc is shifting focus from hiring AI builders to recruiting engineers who can apply AI to solve customer problems, improve delivery and redesign workflows. New-age roles such as forward-deployed engineers and agentic AI engineers are seeing record demand.According to a CIEL HR analysis of over 200 companies in nine sectors conducted for ET, 90% of the firms are hiring for these roles to drive customer-facing solutions and internal efficiency. The survey covered IT services, IT products, startups, global capability centres, manufacturing, retail, ecommerce , financial services