Beyond prompt engineering: What India’s youth actually need to survive the AI revolution

By Govind Rammurthy, CEO & Managing Director, eScan

Every week, I see another advertisement for a new course: “Master ChatGPT in 7 Days,” “Become an AI Expert,” “Learn Prompt Engineering.” Last month, a recent graduate applied to eScan with a resume listing five AI certifications from various online platforms. When I asked him to explain how he would use AI to solve a real security problem we were facing, he froze. He could recite definitions. He knew how to phrase prompts. But he had no idea how to think through a problem.

This is the crisis facing India’s IT workforce, and most people are looking in the wrong direction.

The edge we’re losing

For two decades, India rode a simple advantage: capable developers at a fraction of Western costs, with English fluency that China and other competitors lacked. That combination made us the world’s back office. But ...