AI Data Jobs Attract Highly Skilled Indians

Specialists, from doctors to lawyers, train huge datasets to make them more accurate

- Rohini Mohan

BENGALURU - Dr Sushovan Das has not extracted a tooth in over a year now, but the 28-year-old dentist has found a way to deploy his medical training in "a richer, more adventurous way".

The resident of Howrah in eastern India works at iMerit, a global artificial intelligence (AI) company in technology and data solutions established in 2012 after a brief stint as a dentist at a clinic left him creatively dissatisfied.

"Running a clinic is not financially easy in India, and the repetitive tasks felt suffocating for me," said Dr Das, whose fascination with technology and the promise of "doing financially well right from the beginning of one's career" took him to iMerit.

Dr Das started as a clinical annotator, labelling and marking medical documents and making inferences from medical records.

Annotation is a process of adding labels, tags or transcriptions to large unstructured datasets, such as images, text or audio files, to help machine-learning algorithms understand them.

This was "easy but interdisciplinary work", said Dr Das, who is excited about merging medical science and computer technology, as well as communication.

A quick learner, he now leads a team of 35 annotators training an American healthcare client's AI model to read sonography and X-ray reports, and identify whether a spread of cancer cells is local or distant.

Most of iMerit's 5,000 employees in 12 centres across India, other than in Bhutan and the US, are graduates like Dr Das. A majority are under 35 years old.

AI data services companies engage highly skilled specialists, including doctorate holders, academics, senior doctors, technical experts and communicators, to do advanced dataset training.

This comes as more people globally use generative AI like ChatGPT and DeepSeek; medical, legal and manufacturing industries deploy AI-based automation; and countries compete to develop sovereign AI solutions.