As companies place greater emphasis on AI skills, engineering colleges are seeing campus placements shift towards higher compensation bands.Early trends from the 2026 placement season indicate that the previously popular ₹3-4 lakh range is slowly giving way to offers in the ₹7-12 lakh range, as AI takes over tasks such as testing and coding. Colleges also report that, after the relatively subdued hiring in 2025, overall campus placements have rebounded this year.Premium payPhilip Praveen, COO, Rajalakshmi Engineering College, Chennai, noted an increase in the share of higher-paying offers. “At TCS, for instance, nearly 65 per cent of the offers have been at the Digital and Prime levels, with packages ranging from ₹7 lakh to ₹12 lakh per annum,” he said.K Butchi Raju, Dean and Training and Placement Operations Head at Gokaraju Rangaraju Institute of Engineering and Technology (GRIET), Hyderabad, said low-end coding jobs offering packages in the ₹3/4-lakh range are being phased out, making way for a new ₹9/10-lakh package band.“AI is doing the bulk of the code generation work. Those entry-level jobs will not be there. You need to have skills to meet the new demands of IT firms. They are looking for ‘smart’ freshers who can chip in,” he said.Other colleges, including Chaitanya Bharathi Institute of Technology (CBIT), Hyderabad, and Hindustan Institute of Technology and Science (HITS), Chennai, also reported an increase in compensation, with many students with AI/digital skills receiving offers of around ₹9 lakh.Fresher hiring picks upIn the 2026 placement season, bulk-hiring service firms have kicked off recruitment drives earlier than usual. Praveen said nearly 50 per cent of placements at Rajalakshmi Engineering College took place in June and July, while Raju said his Institute started its placement drives in May, instead of the usual August.Vikas Misra, Vice-Chancellor of HITS, said the institute hopes to close the year with a placement rate of 88-90 per cent, up from around 85 per cent last year.The surge comes as multiple Tier-1 IT service firms have announced plans to ramp up fresher hiring this year, with TCS, Infosys and Cognizant planning to onboard 20,000-25,000 new graduates.Ramachandran Krish, a former Education editor and ed-tech entrepreneur, attributed the increase in fresher hiring to large service organisations gaining better visibility on revenue, client acquisition and talent requirements after two-three years of uncertainty.Shantanu Rooj, Founder and CEO, TeamLease EdTech, said employers are increasingly hiring for specific capabilities such as digital operations, automation, analytics, cloud, AI and modern manufacturing, unlike in the past.With inputs from KV Kurmanath, Hyderabad and Vallari Sanzgiri, MumbaiPublished on August 10, 2026