19 | | OCTOBER, 202619Gl baling and financial services, healthcare, engineering and manufacturing.Government messaging has ampli-fied this momentum. At the India AI Impact Summit held in New Delhi in early 2026, Prime Minister Narendra Modi described AI as marking a trans-formative chapter in human history, one where humans and intelligent sys-tems 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 bench-es, that framing lines up neatly with the mandates their global parent com-panies are now handing them.The Other Pillars of the AI-GCC StoryThe Other Pillars of the AI-GCC Sto-ryBeyond 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 de-tection, 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 Ben-galuru and Hyderabad leading chip design, simulation and post-silicon validation work placing India, along-side the US and China, among the world's top semiconductor talent hubs, aided by initiatives like the India Semi-conductor Mission.ESG has followed the same pattern, with GCCs building AI-powered emis-sions-tracking, anomaly detection and sustainability-reporting tools for glob-al parents. Together, these show AI is not confined to a single team it now runs through security, silicon and sus-tainability alikeBeyond the Metros: Tier-2 and Tier-3 Cities Enter the PictureBeyond the Metros: Tier-2 and Tier-3 Cities Enter the PictureMuch of this growth is no longer confined to Ben-galuru, 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, Ko-chi, Ahmedabad, Indore, Jaipur, Bhu-baneswar and Vadodara are no lon-ger viewed as secondary or fallback locations. They are attracting genuine AI, cloud, analytics and product-engi-neering work, helped along by lower operating costs and, in several cases, stronger talent retention than the met-ros can offer.Policy has moved to support this spread. The Union Budget introduced a formal national framework to help state governments attract and pro-mote GCCs, and in response, roughly ten states have notified, drafted or announced dedicated GCC policies be-tween 2024 and early 2026. More than 170 new GCC set-ups were recorded in a single recent year, split almost even-ly between entirely new entrants to In-dia and expansions by companies al-ready operating here, with technology, engineering and manufacturing, and banking and financial services leading the sectors driving new activity.The Top Companies Leading India's AI-GCC WaveThe Top The shift from back office to AI command centre is easiest to see through the companies actually run-ning these operations. A handful of global names have built some of their largest, most consequential technolo-gy hubs in India, and their India teams are now doing work that shapes prod-ucts used worldwide.Microsoft runs one of its most important engineering centres out of Bengaluru, where teams build core Azure cloud infrastructure and enter-prise 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, run-ning trading systems, fraud detection, risk analytics and compliance technol-ogy that sit at the core of the bank's global operations rather than on its periphery.Goldman Sachs treats its Bengal-uru 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 com-pany's largest research and devel-opment centre outside Germany and 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.SCAN THE QR CODE TO READ THE FULL ARTICLE
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