By M R Yuvatha, Senior Correspondent, Global Consultants Review ,
There was a time when a Global Capability Centre in India meant a floor of engineers answering tickets for a headquarters thousands of miles away. That description no longer fits. Walk into a GCC in Bengaluru, Hyderabad, Pune or Chennai today and you are as likely to find a team designing an AI underwriting engine for a European insurer, training a large language model for a US retailer, or owning the entire global product roadmap for a Fortune 500 firm, as you are to find one doing routine back-office work. The transformation has not arrived with fanfare. It has crept in quietly, year after year, until the numbers made it undeniable.
In 2026, India's GCCs are not just supporting the AI ambitions of global enterprises. They are increasingly the ones setting the pace.
India now hosts the largest concentration of Global Capability Centres in the world. Industry estimates place the ecosystem at more than 2,100 centres, employing upward of 2.3 million professionals and generating close to 100 billion dollars in annual revenue, according to the Nasscom-Zinnov GCC Landscape Report for 2026. That scale alone would be a story worth telling. What makes 2026 different is not the size of the ecosystem but the nature of the work flowing into it.
For years, GCCs were judged on cost arbitrage: how much cheaper it was to run a function out of India than out of the parent company's home market. That yardstick has become almost irrelevant to how mature centres are evaluated today. Analysts covering the sector describe the shift succinctly, noting that GCCs are moving from delivery engines to enterprise nerve centres, with global firms increasingly assigning India-based teams direct responsibility for products, AI systems, platforms and research rather than routine execution.
More than 500 Forbes Global 2000 companies now run a GCC in India, alongside hundreds of mid-market and private-equity-backed centres, and a growing share of them report that their India teams provide value that goes well beyond cost savings.
The most visible marker of this shift is ownership. A center that once waited for instructions from headquarters is now, in many cases, the one deciding what gets built next. Close to a fifth of GCCs are already targeting full global profit-and-loss responsibility by the end of the decade, and hundreds of India-based leaders currently hold mandates that extend across entire regions such as EMEA or the Americas, run out of offices in Bengaluru or Gurugram rather than the traditional headquarters cities abroad.
If there is one force behind this reordering, it is artificial intelligence. GCCs across sectors have stopped treating AI as an experimental sandbox sitting off to the side of the 'real' business. Sector trackers describe a decisive move away from isolated AI pilots toward AI programs that are wired directly into revenue growth, cost efficiency, risk management and customer experience targets. Instead of a handful of data scientists running proof-of-concept projects, GCCs are now expected to embed machine learning and platform teams directly inside product and business units, with clear metrics attached to every initiative.
The scale of that adoption is striking. More than seventy per cent of GCCs have already moved beyond experimentation into enterprise-grade AI deployment, and India has emerged as the leading market globally for AI-focused hiring within the GCC sector. Close to half of GCC leaders say they intend to establish AI as a distinct, core function within their organisation over the next three years, rather than leaving it folded into existing technology teams.
This is not a story about a few flagship centres experimenting with generative AI tools. It is a structural change spreading across an ecosystem of more than two thousand centres, cutting across technology, banking and financial services, healthcare, engineering and manufacturing.
Debjani Ghosh, a distinguished fellow at NITI Aayog and former president of Nasscom, has been candid about how early we still are in this cycle. Speaking at the Carnegie Global Tech Summit, she remarked that the pace of change in AI is something the world has never experienced before, and that the rules of competition are being rewritten as the technology evolves. That sense of acceleration is exactly what is pushing GCCs to move faster than the conventional playbook of gradual, cautious technology adoption would normally allow.
Government messaging has amplified this momentum. At the India AI Impact Summit held in New Delhi in early 2026, Prime Minister Narendra Modi described AI as marking a transformative chapter in human history, one where humans and intelligent systems increasingly co-create and co-evolve, and framed India's technology talent pool as central to that story. For GCCs already sitting on some of the country's deepest engineering benches, that framing lines up neatly with the mandates their global parent companies are now handing them.
Beyond AI itself, India's GCCs have quietly built three other pillars of strength. As AI expands the enterprise attack surface, global companies are shifting full cybersecurity mandates to India, with centres now running detection, response and governance end to end, moving from a compliance-first mindset to one centred on resilience.
On hardware, India hosts over fifty semiconductor-focused GCCs across roughly a hundred centres, with Bengaluru and Hyderabad leading chip design, simulation and post-silicon validation work placing India, alongside the US and China, among the world's top semiconductor talent hubs, aided by initiatives like the India Semiconductor Mission.
ESG has followed the same pattern, with GCCs building AI-powered emissions-tracking, anomaly detection and sustainability-reporting tools for global parents. Together, these show AI is not confined to a single team it now runs through security, silicon and sustainability alike
Much of this growth is no longer confined to Bengaluru, Hyderabad, Pune and Chennai. Around forty per cent of GCCs are actively expanding hiring into Tier-2 and Tier-3 cities, both to access fresh talent pools and to reduce the attrition pressure that has built up in saturated metro job markets.
Cities such as Coimbatore, Kochi, Ahmedabad, Indore, Jaipur, Bhubaneswar and Vadodara are no longer viewed as secondary or fallback locations. They are attracting genuine AI, cloud, analytics and product-engineering work, helped along by lower operating costs and, in several cases, stronger talent retention than the metros can offer.
Policy has moved to support this spread. The Union Budget introduced a formal national framework to help state governments attract and promote GCCs, and in response, roughly ten states have notified, drafted or announced dedicated GCC policies between 2024 and early 2026. More than 170 new GCC set-ups were recorded in a single recent year, split almost evenly between entirely new entrants to India and expansions by companies already operating here, with technology, engineering and manufacturing, and banking and financial services leading the sectors driving new activity.
The shift from back office to AI command centre is easiest to see through the companies actually running these operations. A handful of global names have built some of their largest, most consequential technology hubs in India, and their India teams are now doing work that shapes products used worldwide.
Microsoft runs one of its most important engineering centres out of Bengaluru, where teams build core Azure cloud infrastructure and enterprise AI capabilities that feed directly into Microsoft's global product line, rather than adapting products built elsewhere for the Indian market.
Google has between five and eight thousand specialists working out of Bengaluru and Hyderabad on Search, Android and AI, placing India-based engineers at the centre of products with billions of users.
Amazon and its India technology teams support global e-Commerce, cloud and logistics systems, with AI increasingly embedded in how the company manages inventory, delivery routing and customer experience at scale.
JPMorgan Chase operates large centres in Mumbai and Bengaluru that go well beyond support functions, running trading systems, fraud detection, risk analytics and compliance technology that sit at the core of the bank's global operations rather than on its periphery.
Goldman Sachs treats its Bengaluru centre as a core delivery arm for technology, operations and finance, with India-based teams contributing directly to the firm's global financial services technology stack.
SAP Labs in Bengaluru is the company's largest research and development centre outside Germany and supports the majority of SAP's global software solutions, with teams that own their own product roadmaps rather than executing specifications handed down from headquarters.
Walmart Global Tech, spread across Bengaluru, Chennai and Gurugram, builds the AI-driven supply chain, omnichannel retail and e-commerce systems that support Walmart's operations worldwide, making it one of the company's largest technology centres globally.
Intel's Bengaluru centre focuses on chip design and processor validation, connecting India's semiconductor engineering talent directly to the hardware that underpins AI computing worldwide.
HSBC has built out its India centres around AI-driven data security and modern banking infrastructure, reflecting how deeply financial institutions now rely on India-based teams for mission-critical technology rather than routine processing.
Beyond these, companies including Cisco, Bosch, American Express, Target, Optum and a wide base of consulting GCCs run by Accenture, Deloitte and Capgemini have all deepened their India mandates, spanning cybersecurity, industrial engineering, fraud analytics, retail AI and digital transformation work respectively. What connects all of them is not sector or size, but a shared decision to treat their India centres as places where core, high-stakes technology gets built, not just maintained.
Also Read: Finance Minister Promises Tax Relief for Global Capability Centres in India
Numbers on AI adoption only tell half the story. What matters more is what India’s GCCs are actually building. Several recent, named examples show the shift in practice.
Axis Bank’s AI-first customer service and engineering: Axis Bank’s AI-powered assistant, developed with conversational AI partner Gupshup, has processed more than 20 million customer queries at 97 per cent accuracy. Transaction volumes on the platform have grown 50-fold since launch. The bank has extended the same AI-first approach into software engineering: roughly 30 to 40 per cent of its coding work is now AI-assisted. Fallback or incorrect responses in its internal AI systems have dropped below 10 per cent, down from 20 to 30 per cent in earlier versions.
Amit Lad, who leads the bank’s technology strategy, has noted that this scale of transformation would not have been possible without AI.
Lowe’s India as a talent and product engine: When US home-improvement retailer Lowe’s needed to scale its India centre quickly to support growing digital operations, it built an AI-powered hiring engine that screened candidates against hundreds of parameters and cut sourcing time by more than half.
That centre has since evolved into a significant hub for enterprise architecture, data science, omnichannel platforms and supply-chain technology, supporting Lowe’s global store network and illustrating how quickly a GCC can move from solving a talent-acquisition challenge to owning core technology for the parent company.
Google’s agentic AI platform and the reshaping of banking GCCs: Google Cloud’s continued expansion of its Gemini Enterprise Agent Platform in 2026 has reinforced the shift already underway in India’s banking-sector GCCs. These centres are moving away from routine finance, compliance and basic technology support toward AI infrastructure, agent governance and higher-value oversight roles.
Nasscom president Rajesh Nambiar has observed that India’s GCCs have genuinely moved up the innovation curve, taking on broader problems for their global enterprises than many traditional service providers ever did.
Lantern Pharma’s Bengaluru AI centre for drug discovery: In January 2026, US-based Lantern Pharma announced a new AI Center of Excellence in Bengaluru to industrialise its RADR platform, an AI system used for precision oncology and computational drug development. The move marked the company’s transition from experimenting with AI in cancer research to scaling that capability globally.
Board member Dr Vijay Chandru has described Bengaluru as one of the few global ecosystems that combines world-class AI talent with a maturing biotech research base, positioning the city to industrialise AI-powered drug development at global scale.
None of these scales without people, and GCCs are approaching workforce development with as much seriousness as they apply to their technology roadmaps. Rather than relying on a single training intervention, GCCs are backing a mix of approaches: industry-co-designed certification standards to create a common benchmark for what counts as ‘GCC-ready’ talent, and dedicated AI centres of excellence paired with AI-powered learning platforms that can reskill large numbers of employees at once. PwC's research into this shift found that certification standards and AI-driven reskilling platforms are the two most widely backed measures among GCC leaders navigating the talent gap that rapid AI adoption has created.
This is where the story becomes genuinely structural rather than cyclical. A GCC that owns global AI infrastructure cannot depend on hiring its way out of a skills shortfall indefinitely. It has to build a pipeline: partnerships with universities and research institutions, co-created prototypes with Indian startups, and internal upskilling tracks that turn generalist engineers into specialists in machine learning operations, applied AI, or agentic systems. Several GCCs have gone further, setting up structures sometimes described as shadow boards, where senior India-based leaders advise headquarters executives on digital and AI strategy, a reversal of the traditional direction in which guidance used to flow.
Most projections agree that India's GCC ecosystem will cross the 100-billion-dollar revenue mark within the next few years, with some estimates placing it considerably higher by the end of the decade. What is harder to capture in a revenue figure is the qualitative shift already under way, GCCs that once existed to save money for their parent companies are now the places where those companies are placing their biggest bets on artificial intelligence, cybersecurity, semiconductor engineering and sustainable operations.
That is the real story of India's GCCs in 2026. Not a louder headline number, but a quieter and more consequential change in who gets to decide what the future of enterprise technology looks like. Increasingly, that decision is being made in Bengaluru, Hyderabad, Pune, Coimbatore and a growing list of Indian cities, by teams that were once seen as support staff and are now recognised as architects.
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