India’s next chapter of economic growth is being written not in boardrooms abroad, but in innovation labs and engineering centres across Bengaluru, Hyderabad, Pune, Gurugram and beyond.
According to the ‘Navigating the skills imperative for India’s GCCs in the AI era’ study carried out by PwC and FICCI, GCCs in India are at the centre of a major shift. These centres now employ 2.36 million skilled workers and generate USD 98.4 billion in revenue.
But they are no longer just back-office support units handling routine tasks. Instead, they are quickly becoming global hubs where products are designed, intellectual property is created, and key business decisions are made.
As Union Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman has earlier said, India’s ambition is no longer just to host more GCCs, but to ensure that “an increasing share of the world’s ideas, patents, products, algorithms, platforms, and enterprise capabilities are conceived, engineered, and led from India.”
Scale of India’s GCC Engine: 2,100 centres, 2.36 million jobs and $98.4 billion revenue
The foundation for this shift is already substantial. As of 2026, India hosts over 2,100 GCCs that collectively employ around 2.36 million skilled professionals and generate USD 98.4 billion in revenue. These centres are no longer peripheral to India’s economy—they are core contributors to external account strength, high-value employment and technology intensity.
GCC exports as a proportion of India’s total services exports have risen from 19.7% in 2019 to 23.5% in 2026, underscoring their growing criticality in supporting India’s services export engine.
Nearly two-thirds of GCCs surveyed by PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC India) and the Federation of Indian Chambers of Commerce & Industry (FICCI) represent organisations with more than 500 professionals, and 45% operate as multi-functional centres of excellence delivering capabilities across multiple service lines.
‘Cost efficiency to capability leadership’ — What FM Sitharaman said
This transformation is not just industry-led—it’s a stated policy priority. FM Nirmala Sitharaman has clearly articulated India’s ambition to become a key leader in the GCC arena and indispensable to the world’s knowledge economy as the originator of products, platforms and enterprise capabilities.
“India’s value proposition has shifted from cost efficiency to capability leadership,” said FM Nirmala Sitharaman. “The goal for the next decade isn’t just to host more GCCs, but to ensure a growing share of the world’s ideas, patents, products, and platforms are conceived, engineered, and led from India.”
From cost arbitrage to innovation hubs: 34% are now R&D centres
Today, about 34% of GCCs work as innovation and R&D centres, while one in five plans to take responsibility for global profits and losses by 2030 which shows that GCCs are moving beyond their traditional role of handling support and routine work. They are increasingly involved in business strategy, responsible for results and expected to create value for companies across global markets.
GCCs are already building “products of the AI era”—intelligent systems and AI-native platforms that anchor India’s product-nation ambition. This change is also visible in how GCC leaders measure success. Their focus is shifting from simply carrying out global work to helping shape business strategy, taking responsibility for results, and creating value across different markets.
As one Vice President at a global logistics company’s service centre put it, “Being autonomous, to my mind, is our ability to own business outcomes and solve problems end-to-end, leveraging technology without requiring continued validation from HQ. Autonomy need not be confined to a single GCC location—it can be a globally distributed capability, operating from different parts of the world while maintaining clear end-to-end accountability under a single leader. It is about moving beyond executing tasks and reporting performance to truly owning outcomes.”
GCCs as the enterprise-scale replication of Digital India
The opportunity before GCCs is to replicate this success at enterprise scale. If Digital India proved that the country could build products and platforms that serve a billion people, GCCs now have the potential to create the intelligent products, platforms, and business models that power global enterprises.
The survey data suggests GCC leaders are already embracing this mandate. Half of the respondents envisioned their GCCs becoming global hubs for AI, digital, and innovation capabilities by 2030. More than 85% expected an enhanced operating mandate spanning technology leadership, strategic ownership, and incremental capability expansion.
Only 4% expected their role to remain largely the same as today. Business ownership and higher-value global mandates are emerging as the next stage of GCC maturity, with one in five GCCs targeting global P&L responsibility.
Why this matters for Viksit Bharat?
For India’s Viksit Bharat 2047 vision, the stakes are clear. To realise its ambition, India must evolve into a product nation—designing world-class products, creating intellectual property at home, manufacturing locally at scale, and competing globally on the strength of what it owns and innovates.
GCCs are uniquely placed to lead this transformation because they already sit at the intersection of global enterprise needs and India’s talent and technology base. As GCCs assume greater responsibility for product development, innovation, P&L accountability, and strategic decision-making, they become far more than engines of efficiency.
They become institutions where intellectual property is created, future technologies are developed, and globally significant business decisions are shaped. In doing so, they strengthen India’s position not merely as a destination for talent, but as a source of innovation, enterprise leadership, and economic value creation.
Talent bottleneck: Why hybrid skills are new scarce resource in India’s GCC ecosystem
Despite India’s vast STEM talent pool and leadership in AI skill penetration, GCCs face significant execution challenges in building enterprise-scale AI capabilities. The single biggest constraint, cited by 62% of leaders, is the shortage of professionals who combine deep domain expertise with advanced technology skills—a gap that’s exacerbated by intense competition from other GCCs, IT services firms, and startups chasing the same scarce talent.
Beyond hiring, there’s a critical deficit of senior leadership with AI-era strategic competencies (52%), making it difficult to drive transformational change. The challenge isn’t just about reskilling; it demands a complete reconfiguration of workforce architectures toward hybrid professionals who can fuse frontier AI capabilities with business context, problem-solving, and stakeholder management.
As per the study, the winners in the AI era won’t be those with the most advanced algorithms, but those best able to integrate technology with human judgment and domain knowledge to create enterprise value at scale.
Building composite skills fast enough
The question now is whether GCCs can build composite skills fast enough to ensure that the intelligent products defining the next decade are designed and owned from India. This requires more than coding talent; it demands product management, domain depth, systems architecture, AI/ML expertise, cybersecurity, data governance, and the ability to translate business problems into scalable platforms.
The PwC India–FICCI survey, which draws on 200 senior GCC decision-makers across eight industries, highlights the urgency. Respondents emphasised that the next phase of GCC maturity will depend on accelerating capability build-out in areas like:
- Product management and ownership
- Domain expertise in industry-specific verticals
- Systems architecture and platform engineering
- AI/ML and data science capabilities
- Cybersecurity and data governance
- Business translation skills to convert problems into scalable solutions
GCC phenomenon: India’s distinctive orbit alongside Silicon Valley and Kaizen
The GCC phenomenon has already placed India in a distinctive orbit alongside Silicon Valley in the United States and the Kaizen model in Japan. It acts as a value architecture that creates sustained domestic economic benefit while delivering global enterprise impact.
Just as Silicon Valley established a self-reinforcing innovation cycle through ecosystem reinvestment, organisations are now doubling down on their India-based GCCs, recognising them as innovation engines to be fuelled. The next phase depends on turning that architecture into a product and IP engine that the world cannot ignore.