The GCC Boom: India's Journey from Cost Arbitrage to Innovation

India's 1,700+ GCCs are shifting from cost to co-creation. Can India convert scale, AI depth, and leadership ambition into true orchestration power for global enterprises?

- By Shrikanth G

India's Global Capability Centres (GCCs) have travelled a long road from their back-office origins. What began as a search for cost efficiency has matured into a strategic engine that now shapes how global enterprises build, ship, and scale their tech. Across India, centres that once focused on tasks now own products, steward platforms, and deliver measurable outcomes for the enterprise. The scale is undeniable, more than 1,700 centres already employ close to two million professionals, and Zinnov's projections point to 2,200 centres and 2.8 million jobs by 2030. Yet scale is not the headline. What matters is the shift in strategic evolution: the cost-to-value evolution. Clearly, India is no longer only the world's tech delivery engine and is positioning itself as the orchestration hub of modern enterprise.

That shift comes through in how leaders describe India's GCC centres today. The definition of success is changing from headcount to outcomes, from hours logged to products launched, platforms reused, and resilience during disruption.

In this evolution, one layer of opportunity and complexity is the rise of Generative AI that has accelerated this change, not as a tool layered over old processes, but as a nudge to redesign work itself, to split roles into tasks, allocate them between people and machines, and recombine them into faster, safer, more creative operating models.

It is in this context that India's most mature GCCs are winning global mandates for product ownership, data science, platform leadership, and risk management, mandates that once lived only at headquarters. That is the inflection point this story explores, why India's GCCs are being trusted to orchestrate, not just execute.