Talking points

This realization dawned on Samual Machado, managing director at Sabre International, a travel hospitality company, in a different way. He was talking to a customer when the conversation turned to AI, and he realized that he had nothing to contribute.

"If you have no clue what they're talking about, how are you going to sell? That was a moment of awakening," said Machado, who decided to upgrade his skills to keep up with the changing times. Machado completed an advanced programme in AI for leaders at the Indian Institute of Management (IIM) Calcutta in January. IIM-Calcutta says the programme is "designed to foster cross-functional collaboration within organizations, empowering leaders to harness AI's potential effectively."

The pressure to stay relevant is especially hard on senior leaders who must compete with candidates half their age in a tight job market and career growth paths that are skewed in favour of the young. Recruiters note that this phenomenon is playing out across India Inc. in a way it didn’t even two years ago.

A dipstick survey by specialist staffing company Xpheno of India's senior white-collar talent across 95 leadership titles with 10 years or more of experience showed that 32,000 leaders had AI and machine learning (ML) skills listed on their profiles. This translates to slightly over 4% of India's 800,000 active white-collar leaders.

Upskilling

The drive to add these new skills to their profiles was evident from the fact that almost 60% of the 32,000 leaders upskilled themselves in the past 12 months. An estimated 60,000-70,000 leaders are currently preparing themselves to be AI-aware and AI-skilled.

The upskilling is largely driven by enterprises investing in AI-enabling their talent, with specific focus on senior talent and leadership.

“Market-facing roles and leadership are the first line of touchpoints that enterprises, tech especially, like to showcase fluency of new tech stacks and frameworks, especially if these are generational shifts like AI. It's important that enterprises showcase their frontline as being up to date and fluent with market shifting disruptions, said Kamal Karanth, co-founder of Xpheno.

“The majority of internal functions like finance and HR [human resources] often have low to no interfacing with the market or external stakeholders. And their connect with new tech rollouts occurs only when their function is chosen for the tech transition and deployment of connected tools,” Karanth said.

Technology and BFSI (banking, financial services, and insurance) together account for 56% of all GCC (global capability centres) hiring in India in 2026, and nearly two in three new GCC roles now require AI, data science or automation skills, according to the Foundit insights tracker report. Manufacturing is catching up, having accounted for 24% of GCC AI hiring, but the upskilling push there remains more focused on operational robotics, sensors, and process automation than the leadership-level reskilling happening in IT and financial services.

Staying relevant

Outside these sectors, the pattern is less company-driven and more personal: executives like Machado and Nayyar do not want to wait for a mandate that may arrive too late.

The World Economic Forum’s Future of Jobs report noted that 63 in every 100 Indian workers will need some form of reskilling to stay relevant by 2030. The National Institute of Information Technology, in its skill gap report 2026, estimates that 69% of organizations in India increased their AI skills budgets over the past year.

Corporate provisioning for AI skills is significant, given that programmes at India's premier management institutions cost anything from ₹1.25 lakh to ₹6 lakh. It costs ₹5- ₹6 lakh at IIM Calcutta for a 13-week course. ISB's Leadership with AI programme runs for 20 weeks at ₹2.29 lakh, while IIM Indore's generative and agentic AI programme runs for 24 weeks at ₹1.6 lakh.

Senior executives often approach discussions differently from younger learners, initially taking time to observe, reflect, and understand different perspectives before actively contributing," said Sunill Sood, executive director, executive education and digital learning, ISB. "As the programme progresses, discussions become highly collaborative."

Around 40% of ISB's AI learners have more than 20 years of experience, 38% have 15-19 years of experience, and 22% have 10–14 years of experience. This creates a classroom of experienced leaders representing diverse industries, business functions, and leadership roles.

These are structured, multi-month programmes with on-campus classes, live faculty sessions and cohort-based learning, designed for working professionals who cannot step away from their jobs. The calculation, for most who enrol, is entirely personal: self-funded and squeezed into weekends and late evenings around a full-time senior role.

Ritesh Menghi, global director-finance transformation at ADP, a US-based human resources company, believes executive classrooms today aren't about reliving college or collecting another certificate. They've become leadership networking hubs where experienced professionals challenge assumptions, exchange perspectives, build meaningful networks and understand where they stand in a rapidly changing world."