TeamLease Digital's Neeti Sharma: AI-core tech roles open at 2.5x-3x routine IT pay

Routine IT work may be headed for automation, but the skills that sit closest to building and governing AI are already earning a clear pay premium, according to Neeti Sharma, CEO of TeamLease Digital. Writing in the Times of India, she cites an analysis of more than 37,000 technology and digital roles to argue that India's tech talent market is being repriced around capability.

The headline finding is a reversal of old salary logic. A GenAI engineer in Indore has a median fixed salary of Rs 16.5 lakh a year, ahead of a cybersecurity engineer in Bengaluru at Rs 14.4 lakh. In Sharma's reading, skill tier and proximity to AI now count for more than location or tenure, which long served as shortcuts for market value.

She sorts roles into three tiers. AI-core jobs, which build, own and govern intelligent systems, open at Rs 13.2 lakh a year for early-career hires, with projected annual growth of 16% to 21%. AI-support roles, covering routine monitoring, data quality checks and first-line maintenance, start at Rs 4.8 to 5.4 lakh and grow 7% to 8%. A middle AI-adjacent tier, where professionals apply AI within core workflows, commands mid-level premiums. The gap at entry level is 2.5x to 3x, and Sharma says it compounds over time.

Scarcity is the driver. Only 16% of India's technology workforce is described as having advanced AI capabilities, while the enterprise talent shortfall in GenAI and cloud architecture is put at 53% to 60%. For job seekers, the message is that prompting and basic tool use are fast becoming table stakes, not differentiators.

The more durable premium, she argues, goes to people who can link technical execution with risk oversight, domain knowledge and business accountability. She frames this as a shift from AI fluency, meaning role-specific workflows and task automation, to AI capability, meaning systems that are deployed, secured, governed and scaled with named human accountability.

Companies face their own gap. While 81% of APAC midmarket enterprises have embedded AI in daily operations, just 27% say their leaders are fully ready to use AI-generated insights, apply critical judgment and manage compound risk. Some 66% of organisations report trust problems around AI output, data privacy and ethical compliance, and only 15% of APAC CEOs say AI has delivered both revenue growth and cost cuts, with half seeing neither yet.

The bottleneck, Sharma says, is verification: polished code, market notes or legal summaries can look authoritative while hiding flawed assumptions, and models cannot check their own context. For India's workforce, that points to an upbeat reading, with the best-paid opportunities likely to go to those who can question, validate and own AI's work. Read the original piece at the Times of India.

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