Ahmedabad will be India’s next Silicon Valley

Bangalored. Global firms are realising that white-collar jobs can be done from anywhere, so y’re doubling down on India, where labour costs are a fraction of what y are in West. y will build a cheap and reliable workforce outside tritional technology hubs of Bengaluru and Hyderab. As a result, India will have many Silicon Valleys. Fortune 500 companies from Walmart to Germany’s Bosch are just as likely to consider India when hiring artificial intelligence experts as y are for back-office roles. Increasingly, firms are leaning on employees in country to execute more complex engineering and research tasks.

For instance, engineers at Boeing’s hub in Bengaluru used machine learning to help upgre wire designs on aircraft including Chinook helicopter to cut down on design time. company is investing $200 million in a new office near city’s airport. Such global capability centres (GCCs) will employ about 4.5 million workers in India by 2030, more than double current number, EY estimates.

However, centres like Bengaluru are plagued with infrastructure problems and are getting pricier to operate in. Currently, a of all staff at India’s GCCs are based in just one city, according to research from consulting firm Zinnov. se employees also tend not to stick around in ir jobs for very long. Record demand by global companies for cloud services during pandemic coincided with high-paying venture capital-funded startups poaching workers. Attrition at India’s top three IT services firms including Tata Consultancy Services soared to an average of over 22% in financial year 2022, for example. That makes places like Ahmedab, Coimbatore, Mysuru and Jaipur more attractive as emerging hubs. Talent and real estate costs for companies can be about 30% and 50% cheaper, respectively, according to Deloitte.

While cities like Austin and Miami in United States have struggled to replicate success of Silicon Valley, India won’t face same problem. Nearly 75% of country’s top 100 engineering schools, like alma maters of Microsoft and Alphabet bosses Satya Nella and Sundar Pichai, are in smaller towns anyway. Indian workers are young and willing to move, so companies can build offices in far-flung places and talent will follow.

Firms are creating positions at a rapid pace – more than 200,000 roles in India for data scientists and AI experts remained unfilled as of August 2022. As global companies leverage technology to usher in next wave of productivity, y could also find mselves spreing out across South Asian nation.