THE GCC Playbook

India's GCC story has shifted from scale to strategy, and Lalit Ahuja, Founder & CEO, ANSR, outlines the principles shaping how global capability centres are designed, built, and evolved for the future

- Rashmi Naicker

India's Global Capability Centre (GCC) story has moved well beyond its back- office origins, and that shift is quietly reshaping not just talent strategies, but the country's built environment itself. Today, India hosts over 1,800 GCCs employing more than two million professionals, with projections suggesting this number could cross 2,500 centres and 3.4 million jobs by 2030. Yet, despite the scale, the narrative around GCCs remains dangerously oversimplified. Often reduced to a real-estate or cost-arbitrage play, GCCs are, in reality, becoming the core engines of enterprise transformation, driving R&D, data science, product innovation, and digital leadership for global corporations.

Global Capability Centres have evolved into strategic engines that shape how multinational organisations innovate, collaborate, and grow. As enterprises deepen their reliance on India for core business functions, the implications extend well beyond talent to workplace design, sustainability, technology, and commercial real estate. In this conversation, Lalit Ahuja, Founder and CEO of ANSR, reflects on why India's GCC growth marks a fundamental shift rather than a cyclical trend, how workspaces are being reimagined as strategic assets, and what it takes to build environments that can keep pace with the speed, complexity, and ambition of the modern global enterprise.

He also raises an uncomfortable truth: many organisations are still designing GCCs like scaled-up IT offices, missing the strategic opportunity to embed brand, culture, and business context into these workplaces. As GCCs increasingly determine where companies innovate, and not just where they save costs, the question is no longer why they are coming to India, but whether India's workspaces are evolving fast enough to deserve them.

Why India’s GCC boom is different