Developers in India are learning AI skills on their own even as many companies still don’t have a formal AI policy in place. A new report by Agoda, released last week, claims that 72% of developers in India are self-learning AI skills that they can use currently at work, while also getting ready for an AI driven job market.
The most sought after AI skills among developers include prompt engineering, integrating AI tools into dev workflows, working with AI APIs and frameworks, and fluency in analytics and model behavior.
According to IBM’s Cost of Data Breach report, released in August, 60% of organizations in India still don’t have an AI governance policy or are developing one. IBM found that many organizations are bypassing AI governance for a do-it-now AI adoption.
The recent tech layoffs that have impacted thousands of developer jobs is also the reason why many are learning these skills on their own. According to Layoffs.fyi, which tracks tech layoffs, over 112,732 tech workers have been laid off by 218 tech companies across the world this year.
The Agoda report shows that 87% have changed their career priorities because of AI as they don’t want to fall behind.
ChatGPT remains the most used GenAI assistant among developers in India, followed by GitHub Copilot, Cursor and Gemini. Developers claim to have saved 1 to 6 hours every week because of them. Around 37% developers said that they save 4-6 hours every week because of these GenAI tools. The most significant impact of GenAI on the software development cycle has been seen in integrated development environments (74%), deployment or infrastructure (69%), but not as much in testing (34%), code review (20%), and documentation (16%).
AI providers such as OpenAI have upgraded the capabilities of new models to make them more relevant for the developer community. For instance, their latest model GPT-5, released in August, can debug large code repositories by backtracking and correcting its mistakes, allowing it to fix bugs in complex systems much faster.
In terms of where GenAI is being used, 94% developers said that they are using it for code generation, even though most of them still don’t completely trust these tools. Around 70% developers said that they always review and rework the AI generated code before merging them. Also, use of GenAI has improved the speed of work for 93% of them, while enhancing code quality for 72%.
That said, use of GenAI is limited to individual output as most developers are still using them as personal assistants. Around 57% said that they are adjusting their code review practices, while 46% feel that involvement of leadership is lagging behind. This can be due to the fact that many organizations don’t have top-down AI policy in place while managers are hesitant due to security and cost concerns.
According to TeamLease Digital, demand for AI jobs is growing faster than the available talent. For every 10 GenAI related roles only 1 qualified engineer is available. Prompt engineering, LLM safety and tuning, AI orchestration, AI compliance, agent design, and simulation governance are most in-demand AI jobs with salary of ₹ 18 to 35 lakhs, as per TeamLease.
The Agoda report is based on a survey of 600 developers in 7 South East Asian countries including India. While it may not be statistically representative of the entire developer community, it gives a glimpse into an interesting trend of developers taking AI upskilling in their own hands instead of waiting for company-led training.