Engineering India’s future energy workforce

As India’s energy demand accelerates, the challenge is no longer only about scale, but about how complex systems are operated and optimised. In this article, Shane McArdle, CEO of Kongsberg Digital, explores how industrial intelligence and AI can support scale, growth, and operational excellence across India’s energy system. 

India is projected to be the world’s largest driver of energy-demand growth by 2035, accounting for the highest increase in global oil demand and more than 15 exajoules of new consumption – roughly the same amount of energy Japan uses in an entire year (IEA World Energy Outlook 2025).  

Rapid urbanisation, industrial expansion and rising incomes are reshaping India’s energy system at an unprecedented scale. Over the next decade, the country’s growth is expected to match the combined increase of China and Southeast Asia. 

Scale, however, brings complexity. India’s future energy mix will remain diverse – spanning coal, oil and gas alongside rapidly expanding solar, wind and nuclear capacity. Meeting this demand while balancing security, affordability and sustainability requires more than new infrastructure. It requires new intelligence.  

Where industrial intelligence will matter most 

As energy systems become more interconnected, AI is increasingly central to how operations are planned, executed, and optimised. In the near term, three areas offer immediate and measurable impact:

1. Operations and maintenance: Agentic AI and intelligent co-pilots can support teams with context-aware recommendations, anomaly detection and guided troubleshooting 

2. Planning and optimisation: Integrated simulation, physics-based modelling and digital twins bring industrial knowledge into daily workflows to optimise energy usage and predict system behaviour with lower operational risk.

3. Data flow and governance: AI-enabled data verification, quality scoring and end-to-end traceability improve confidence in information used for commercial, safety and regulatory decisions – strengthening the digital foundations for reliable optimisation across the entire energy system. 

These capabilities signal a shift in how work is done. As energy systems grow more interdependent, the real advantage will come from enabling technology that improves how humans and AI work together. 

India’s AI advantage: The human factor

India contributes approximately 16% of the global AI talent pool, a figure expected to grow to more than 1.25 million professionals by 2027 (India Skills Report 2026). At the same time, more than 40% of India’s IT workforce is already using AI for automation, analytics and creative tasks.  

This combination of scale, technical capability and a strong STEM foundation positions India well to lead in AI-enabled energy operations. However, a clear challenge remains: industrial AI talent – professionals who understand both advanced technology and complex energy operations – must scale rapidly.  

Addressing this gap will require technology that simplifies complexity rather than amplifying it, empowering the next generation of engineers, operators and planners to apply advanced intelligence without needing deep specialisation in every underlying system. 

Scaling expertise through technology

By bringing together operational data, documentation, and simulation in a shared environment, an industrial work surface allows teams to interact with complex systems more intuitively. 

Operators, engineers and decision-makers can explore scenarios, run “what-if” analyses, or invoke AI agents to surface insights that previously required years of specialised knowledge and experience. 

Rather than replacing people, AI acts as a force multiplier for faster collaboration, less friction and better decision-making across the energy value chain. This approach is already being adopted at scale, with thousands of users globally supported by AI agents that understand asset behaviour, maintenance activities, and operational workflows. 

A digital-human workforce for the future of energy

Over the next three to five years, agentic systems will mature from experimental tools into orchestration and context-engineering capabilities – helping teams express intent, assemble relevant information and manage multi-step workflows across complex asset portfolios.  

With its deep talent base, strong digital readiness and growing AI capabilities, India is well positioned to shape how this digital-human workforce develops. 

As reliability, efficiency and sustainability pressures intensify, success will depend on aligning human experience with scalable industrial intelligence.  

Countries and organisations that succeed will be those that embed intelligence directly into how work is done — supporting people with the right context, at the right time, to make better decisions across the energy system.

 

These discussions will likely be front and centre at India Energy Week, where leaders from across the energy value chain will explore how ambition translates into real-world execution. If you are planning on attending, please use the link below to book a meeting or stop by our booth.