Only 23% of India's early-career tech professionals qualify as AI-native, even as roughly two-thirds are considered AI-proficient, according to a new report by IT industry body Nasscom.
The findings point to a widening gap between broad AI adoption and the deeper engineering judgement needed to use the technology effectively, the industry body said, warning that India risks building a workforce that is AI-reliant rather than truly AI-native.
'AI Skills Penetration Is Not The Same As Being AI-Native'
Nasscom launched the report, titled The State of AI-Native Talent in India, on Tuesday, introducing a structured industry benchmark to assess AI capabilities among early-career professionals with up to three years of experience, including final-year engineering students.
While more than 90% of the country's young tech workforce has already adopted AI tools, the report found this widespread usage does not automatically translate into the deeper, independent technical judgement that defines true AI-native talent.
Sangeeta Gupta, senior vice president and chief strategy officer at Nasscom, said India was well positioned to become a global hub for AI-native technology talent, but cautioned that AI skills penetration was not the same as being AI-native. She said academia needed to strengthen fundamentals, while industry needed to redesign onboarding and mentorship, to ensure the decline of routine coding work did not lead to a decline in deep engineering expertise.
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Automation Cutting Into How Junior Engineers Learn
The report noted that while AI demonstrably improves productivity and learning speed, it is also automating the very routine tasks through which junior engineers have traditionally built their foundational knowledge. As a result, organisations and educational institutions will need to deliberately recreate opportunities for engineers to develop independent judgement and orchestration skills that were previously gained through hands-on experience, Nasscom said.
To close this gap, Nasscom urged academia to move beyond traditional coding instruction toward strengthening engineering judgement, domain learning and reimagined assessment methods, while asking industry to deepen mentorship, build foundational capabilities, embed AI verification into workflows and continuously upskill early-career talent.
For the IT sector, the shift will also mean rethinking hiring assessments, moving away from testing basic coding knowledge toward evaluating comprehensive AI-native capabilities, alongside AI-augmented foundational learning and simulation-based exercises for junior staff.
(With PTI inputs)
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