AI Adoption Pushes 93% of Indian CTOs to Drive Future-of-Work Changes

Around 93 per cent of Indian chief technology officers (CTOs) said their role is increasingly focused on helping organisations adapt to future ways of working, a report said on Thursday.

Around 79 per cent of CTOs said their remit now includes tasks that were not part of it a year earlier, the report from LinkedIn said.

In addition, 84 per cent of CTOs felt their role is being actively redefined in real time.

"As their responsibilities continue to evolve, CTOs are also navigating growing expectations around AI implementation and business impact," the report said.

As many as 79 per cent of respondents said their role is changing faster than their company can make decisions, while 56 per cent mentioned balancing long‑term AI transformation with short‑term performance demands as a major leadership challenge.

"With over 9 in 10 Indian CTOs acknowledging that their role has shifted toward helping organisations adapt to the future of work, technology leadership today extends far beyond managing systems and infrastructure," said Malai Lakshmanan, Head of India Engineering, LinkedIn.

"As AI adoption moves from experimentation to scale, success depends as much on people as it does on technology. Employees need the skills and confidence to make AI part of how they work every day, which is why closer collaboration between CTOs and talent leaders has become essential," Malai Lakshmanan added.

The organisations that create the most value from AI will be those that invest as heavily in workforce readiness and continuous learning as they do in technology, the report said.

'Prompt engineer' and 'AI engineer' were identified as the fastest‑growing roles in India.

The report highlighted that 81 per cent of CTOs face pressure to move faster on AI than they can effectively measure its impact.

The report said 51 per cent of CTOs view stronger CTO‑CHRO partnerships as the single most critical factor in building an effective AI-enabled workforce and 89 per cent of CTOs reported working closely with their CHROs.