Introduction
Not long ago, a Global Capability Centre in India was, in practice, little more than a large operations floor dedicated to processing tickets, reconciling invoices, and handling calls that headquarters preferred not to field itself. The proposition was pretty straightforward i.e. lower cost, greater scale. This model proved sufficiently effective for a sustained period that GCCs proliferated across Bengaluru, Hyderabad, and Pune, with little pressure on the industry to interrogate what would come next.
That question has finally caught up with the industry. AI has stepped into the GCC story and changed the rules, and this isn’t just a surface-level change. Nasscom and Zinnov’s 2026 estimates place India’s GCC ecosystem at more than 2,100 centres, employing over 2.3 million professionals and generating close to US$100 billion annually, yet the figure that deserves attention is not headcount or revenue.1 It’s the shift underneath those numbers, from what one recent analysis calls “labour-cost arbitrage” toward something closer to “capability arbitrage.”2 Multinational companies are establishing centres in India not because Indian engineers cost less but Indian teams bring deep technical skills, real understanding of how the business runs, and hands-on experience actually using AI, at a scale that’s hard to find elsewhere.
This reframing becomes considerably less abstract on closer inspection. Reuters recently spoke with several GCC leaders who described deploying AI across marketing, finance, human resources, and content creation, automating precisely the repetitive work that once consumed entire teams for weeks at a stretch.3 Apollo Hospitals, working with Microsoft, has rolled out an AI assistant that helps doctors pull together patient information and get insights much faster than before.4 None of this is a “someday” idea. It’s already happening, and it’s already changing what a normal workday at a GCC looks like.
How AI Is Changing What GCCs Are Trusted to Do
The bigger shift isn’t really about AI replacing tasks but it’s about who gets to make the decisions. EY’s GCC Pulse Survey found that 92 percent of GCC leaders now say their centres do a lot more than just save money, and 58 percent are already investing in agentic AI, with another 29 percent planning to within the year.5 Eighty-three percent are scaling generative AI in some form.6 These are not the figures of a pilot-project numbers. They show an industry betting heavily that AI should sit at the core of how things get done, not just added on the side.
The same pattern is visible at the level of individual companies. At Allvue Systems’ Pune centre, leadership has already hired an AI Product Management Manager, which is a small detail that says a great deal, because product management has traditionally stayed close to headquarters.7 MetLife’s India tech head talked about an internal AI platform supporting the company’s engineering teams, and said conversations with global stakeholders have completely changed: it’s no longer about how many tickets got closed, but the emphasis has moved away from delivery metrics towards the value being created for the customer.8 That’s a genuinely different relationship between an offshore centre and the company that owns it.
India’s Chief Economic Advisor, V. Anantha Nageswaran, made a point at the CII GCC Business Summit this year that’s worth sitting with. He argued that in a well-run GCC, AI increases the value of each employee rather than displacing them, though he tempered this with a caution against complacency, pointing to rising domestic costs and the close attention other countries are now paying to India’s model.9 Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman pushed the point further, telling industry leaders that the goal for the next decade shouldn’t just be hosting GCCs, but making sure more of the world’s patents, algorithms, and products are actually built and designed in India.10 That’s a much higher bar than the industry has cleared over the last twenty years, and it’s genuinely unclear whether every centre can get there.
The Risks AI Brings to the GCC Growth Story
None of this erases the harder conversation happening alongside it. AI is, after all, quite good at exactly the kind of routine coding, customer support, and back-office processing that built the offshoring industry in the first place, and there’s a real argument that this erodes the cost advantage that drew multinationals to India to begin with.11 Replacement hiring reportedly makes up around 40 percent of GCC roles today, even as nearly 60 percent of new positions focus on AI, data, and platform skills.12 Read those two figures side by side and you get a picture of an industry reshuffling its workforce in real time rather than simply expanding it, which is a very different story from the one GCCs have told about themselves for years.
There’s also a resource problem that doesn’t get nearly enough attention in boardroom talk about AI-native GCCs. The push toward AI-heavy infrastructure has driven up demand for high-density computing power, and the global data centre industry now uses something like 560 billion litres of water a year just for cooling, roughly what a city of eight million people uses at home.13 In a country already dealing with serious water shortages in several of its major tech hubs, that’s not a small detail. It’s a real limit that will eventually clash with all the growth targets being thrown around at industry summits.
New Areas Where AI Is Expanding the Role of GCCs
Even so, the overall direction is fairly clear, and it goes well beyond software. India now makes up close to a fifth of the world’s chip design workforce and is home to a good chunk of the world’s semiconductor GCCs, with engineers working on advanced chip designs that would’ve been unthinkable at an offshore centre a decade ago.14 Global companies are also increasingly basing their ESG and compliance work in India, relying on the country’s growing strength in data engineering to handle sustainability reporting that gets more complicated every year.15 Centres once concentrated firmly in Bengaluru and Hyderabad are steadily extending into Tier-2 cities such as Coimbatore, Kochi, and Ahmedabad, partly to manage loss and partly because the talent available in these locations has become sufficiently deep to support serious technical work.16
Capgemini expects 2026 to be a turning point for the sector. This is the year GCCs are supposed to stop treating AI as an experiment and start treating it as the normal way of working. Alongside that shift, there’s also expected to be much greater focus on governance, transparency, and trust in how these AI systems are actually used.17 That last part matters more than it might sound. A GCC that can build a smart AI tool but can’t explain how it actually reaches its decisions isn’t really adding value for the company that owns it. Instead, it’s a risk waiting to blow up at the worst possible time, whether that’s in front of a regulator or in a courtroom.
What AI Means for the Future of Indian GCCs
If one ignores all the fancy talk from industry summits and consulting firms, what’s left is a real and serious shift. GCCs built their whole reputation on being reliable and cheap to run. AI is compelling them to become something else entirely: centres of judgment, product ownership, and decision-making, rather than simply venues where decisions made elsewhere are carried out. Some centres will manage that transition. Many will not, and those that remain confined to the older execution model will eventually find themselves competing on cost against AI systems that require neither breaks nor raises, a contest they cannot realistically win.
India’s GCC industry is now big enough to rival entire national economies, so getting this transition right matters more than it might seem from the outside. Centres that only use AI to do the same old work faster will eventually get replaced by that same technology. The ones that use AI as a reason to take on bigger, more trusted responsibilities are the ones actually shaping where this industry goes next.
1 Arya Roy Bardhan & Soumya Bhowmick, Capability in the Age of AI: India’s GCCs and the Future of White-Collar Work, Observer Research Foundation (June 2026), https://www.orfonline.org/research/capability-in-the-age-of-ai-india-s-gccs-and-the-future-of-white-collar-work (last visited July 13, 2026).
3 Reuters, India’s Global Capability Centers Are Becoming AI Innovation Labs For Multinational Firms, Allwork.Space (May 28, 2026), https://allwork.space/2026/05/indias-global-capability-centers-are-becoming-ai-
innovation-labs-for-multinational-firms/ (last visited July 13, 2026).
5 EY India, India’s GCCs Driving Intelligent, AI-Native Enterprise Shift, EY (Jan. 22, 2026), https://www.ey.com/en_in/insights/consulting/global-capability-centers/india-s-gccs-are-leading-the-shift-to-intelligent-ai-native-enterprises (last visited July 13, 2026).
7 YourStory, From Delivery Hubs to Decision Centres: India’s GCCs Reshape the Global Enterprise, YourStory (Apr. 17, 2026), https://yourstory.com/2026/04/tdelivery-hubs-decisions-centres-indias-gccs-reshape-global-
enterprisehe-ys (last visited July 13, 2026).
9 Vajiram & Ravi, Global Capability Centres: India’s Shift to Innovation, Vajiram & Ravi Current Affairs (2026), https://vajiramandravi.com/current-affairs/global-capability-centres/ (last visited July 13, 2026).
11 Drishti IAS, Global Capability Centres and India’s Growth, Drishti IAS Daily Updates (Apr. 29, 2026), https://www.drishtiias.com/daily-updates/daily-news-editorials/global-capability-centres-and-indias-growth (last visited July 13, 2026).
17 Geetanjali Khatri, GCCs Enter the AI-Native Era, Capgemini India (May 8, 2026), https://www.capgemini.com/in-en/insights/expert-perspectives/gccs-enter-the-ai-native-era-2025-reflections-and-outlook/ (last visited July 13, 2026).
