Several Indian startups are hunting for talent in artificial intelligence machine learning , robotics and big data across the world to overcome a big demand-supply mismatch for talent with knowledge of futuristic technologies.While some of them are trying to rope in talent from markets such as the US, Europe and China, most are scouting for Indian professionals with an international stint or a global degree to improve cost efficiency. Besides poor availability of talent in cutting-edge fields such as technology, education, gamification, robotics and healthcare, what have triggered this drive include increasing global focus and the need to understand various markets outside, experts said.“With technology driving the future of startups, they have no choice but to scout for global talent (mostly Indians who want to return) or get people with global exposure or those who may have studied in schools abroad,” said GC Jayaprakash, executive director, RGF Executive Search India.“There are a host of small startups that have some of their core founding team members from outside India,” he said. Logistics startup Rivigo, online education and training service providers UpGrad and Simplilearn, and beauty products website Nykaa are among startups looking to hire talent abroad. Rivigo , for example, looks to build “India’s best technology and AI team” this year, its cofounder Gazal Kalra said.“We are looking at hiring 500 top engineers from across the world to our technology team this year with a dedicated AI team that will work on futuristic AI applications in logistics,” she said.Rivigo is the one of the first logistics companies in the country to deploy AI and machine learning.Using the data that it collects from ‘smart trucks’ every month, the company is deploying technology heavily, thus building efficient and scalable technology systems, minimising business cost and maximising safety.Rajeev Banduni, chief executive of advisory services firm GrowthEnabler, feels the development also marks an image makeover for India. “Earlier, India was just known as a place where engineers resided. Now Indian startups are building talent that has global exposure,” he said.For the past two years, there have been a lot of global uncertainties, especially in the US. A lot of people are thinking of working from India and not the US. “The funds are normally coming from global companies and the startups are here, so it is best of both worlds as there’s a reverse brain drain,” said Baduni, who has a lot of requests from European students, particularly from the UK and Spain, for internships. He said 80-85% talent is coming back to India.The two key reasons startups hire from outside the country are for qualified top talent, particularly on the technology side, and to strengthen their global operations. “There is enough local talent in engineering and analytics, but there is an acute dearth of people in UI/UX, artificial intelligence, machine learning, etc.,” said CK Guruprasad, consultant at executive search firm Spencer Stuart.UpGrad, started by UTV cofounder Ronnie Screwvala, is among those looking to expand presence in global markets. It has a team of three Chinese Singaporeans focused on analysing the Southeast Asian market and deciding upon its market-entry strategy. The firm is also talking to some Chinese education professionals to join it to help bring learning from Chinese markets.“Even our current team members are taking up options for higher education in the US,” said Mayank Kumar, cofounder at UpGrad. “We have one joining HBS in the coming batch; (and) some joining MS and PhD programmes in data science after working on the data science content team,” he said.Likewise, as many as 22 members in Nykaa’s 80-people business and marketing team are those who have come back to India from the US and Europe. “A mix of talent is important — local and international — it allows us to grow as a global company,” said Nihir Parikh, chief business officer at Nykaa. According to him, the company plans to hire 200 people this year and 20-25% of them “will either have international experience or would have studied there”.There are others such as Simplilearn that have teams in the US working in marketing, enterprise sales, and customer relationship functions. These teams keep visiting the Bengaluru office to better understand the culture and business dynamics, while collaborating with the teams here. However, the availability of such global talent is tougher and their salaries are higher. A similar talent in the US/western world coming to India would be 30-50% costlier than what’s available in India.But then, startups have no option when it comes to AI talent.Candidates for AI roles related to natural language processing (NLP), deep learning, and machine learning are thin on the ground, according to the Talent Supply Index of Belong, which helps clients search for and hire AI professionals.The ratio of the number of people to jobs in deep learning is 0.53, while for machine learning it’s 0.63 and for NLP it’s 0.71.Only 4% of AI professionals in India have worked on cutting-edge technologies such as deep learning and neural networks, the key ingredients in building advanced AI-related solutions, said Rishabh Kaul, cofounder of recruitment startup Belong.“Roles in data science and data engineering (which are different facets of the AI family of skills) are at the intersection of math, statistics and programming,” he said. “This isn’t typically taught at Indian colleges as part of formal learning.”Experts said that though hiring of international talent has not yet become as widespread as the demand envisages — because of the difficulty of getting global talent into India — but going ahead, it could be tough for startups to find new technology people unless local talent is given skill training in the relevant areas.Yazad Dalal, head of HCM cloud applications (Asia Pacific) at Oracle said the way to create homegrown talent and spur investment is “through government leadership”, the way China is doing. Take a look at China’s example, where they have a three-year plan to dominate in AI, he said.The good news is that in his budget speech in February, finance minister Arun Jaitley announced that the government will launch a national programme on AI and doubled budget allocation for Digital India — the government’s main initiative for promoting AI, machine learning and other innovations — to Rs 3,073 crore for this year.Even in the US, where private sector dominates AI investments, it was the government that initially led the initiative, Dalal said. “A large spur to the technology domination of that country was driven by (its defence research agency) DARPA. Major initiatives today are also led by DARPA challenges that have led to the self-driving car industry, for instance.”