Artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning have become buzzwords in the tech sector. Promising to transform the whole industry, more and more companies are rushing to adopt the rapidly advancing technology to keep ahead of competition. However, the rising trend of AI adoption in the workplace is not followed by availability of talents in these expertise. Companies in India are struggling to find skilled professionals the job vacancies.

A new joint survey by ed-tech platform Great Learning and online data science ecosystem Analytics Vidhya found that at least 50,000 positions in data science and machine learning are lying vacant due to a shortage of skilled and qualified talent. This is twice the number of professionals available in data science and machine learning, it added.

Commenting on the findings, Great Learning co-founder Hari Krishnan Nair said, “With more and more jobs increasingly becoming data driven, the need of the hour for professionals is to upskill themselves to stay relevant. Over the past year, we have seen heightened interest from companies across IT, BFSI [banking, financial services and insurance] and telecom for professionals in data science.”

See: IT Firms in India to Increase Hiring Plans for the Next 6 Months: Report

BFSI companies have created 44 percent of analytics and data science jobs in 2017, followed by 12 percent each by e-commerce companies and the healthcare sector, the report said. Energy (8 percent); telecom (6 percent); media (6 percent) and retail, automobile and travel also contributed to demand for talent in this space. Besides those sectors, opportunities for AI experts are also set to soar by 2020 in non-traditional sectors like aviation, cybersecurity, agriculture, healthcare, and driverless transportation.

Quoting a Gartner report, the survey stated that 75 percent of the one million registered companies in India have invested or are planning to invest in machine learning and data science. Companies are looking for talent with expertise in cloud, big data analytics, and machine learning (ML) to fill the vacant positions, Fortune India reports.

“While the highest number of job searches is observed in SQL (structured query language), Python is the fastest growing, owing to the greater support of machine learning libraries. On the other hand, jobs in SAS have declined recently. Data scientist, data analyst, data architect, data statistician, ML engineer, ML specialist, technical architect, data engineer are some of the most popular roles available,” the report said.

Read also: 98% Singaporean Leaders Say They Have Hired the Wrong Person for the Job