India's Next AI Talent Wave Is Coming From Lucknow, Jaipur, and Patna , Not Bengaluru

Ask most people where India's AI talent lives and the answer comes back in a familiar shorthand: Bengaluru, then Hyderabad, then Pune. That mental map is accurate as far as it goes. But a new dataset suggests the edges of the map are starting to fill in, and for learners sitting in Lucknow or Nagpur wondering whether geography is working against them, the answer is changing faster than the conventional wisdom has caught up.

One in Five Learners, and Counting Scaler's India AI Workforce Report 2026,

based on responses from 11,444 professionals, found that nearly one in five AI learners now comes from a Tier-II city, according to Business Standard. The cities named in the data include Lucknow, Jaipur, Patna, Indore, Coimbatore, and Nagpur. Bengaluru, Hyderabad, Pune, Mumbai, and Chennai still dominate the overall talent landscape, and no one is claiming otherwise. But a 20 percent share of new learners originating outside those five metros is a meaningful structural shift, not a rounding error. The significance is in what that number implies about access. For years, the argument was that AI learning required proximity to a metro ecosystem: bootcamps, peer networks, recruiters at coffee shops. The Scaler data, reported by Business Standard, suggests that online learning infrastructure has quietly broken that dependency. Whether learners in Tier-II cities are converting that learning into equivalent employment outcomes at the same rate as their metro counterparts is a question the current evidence does not answer. That gap, if it exists, is the next thing worth watching.

AI as a General-Purpose Skill, Not

a Specialist Badge The geographic finding only makes sense in context of a broader shift the report documents. According to Manufacturing Today India's coverage of the Scaler report, AI has moved from being a specialised skill to a broader workforce capability across industries. Over 50 percent of career outcomes tracked in the report now sit outside traditional software development roles, spanning leadership, consulting, operations, marketing, and finance. That is the structural reason Tier-II city learners are entering the picture: the addressable skill is no longer confined to ML engineers writing model training loops. It now includes operations professionals using AI tools to redesign workflows, or finance analysts building automated reporting pipelines. This matters for how learners should think about what to study. A course that teaches you to deploy a transformer model from scratch is not the same product as a course that teaches you to integrate AI tools into a business process. Both have value. But the second one is increasingly what employers across a wider range of industries and geographies are actually hiring for. The credential you need depends entirely on which of those jobs you are trying to get.

Who Else the Data Surfaces One

data point from the Scaler report worth noting for its broader implication: women who transitioned into AI-enabled careers reported a 145 percent increase in salary, according to Mint's coverage of the report. That figure sits alongside the geographic diversification story as evidence of the same underlying dynamic. AI capability is becoming a lever that works across demographic and geographic lines that previously constrained career mobility in Indian tech. The mechanisms differ, but the direction is consistent. For a learner in a Tier-II city considering whether to invest time in AI upskilling, the honest framing is this: the demand signal is real, the geographic barrier is lower than it was two years ago, and the skill that employers across industries want is broader than what the specialist job titles suggest. The question to pressure-test is whether the specific program you are considering teaches you to build something, or just teaches you to describe something. One of those outcomes travels well regardless of the city on your address. Watch for whether the next iteration of this data shows Tier-II city learners closing the gap in hiring outcomes, not just learning participation. That conversion rate is the real signal.