How Indian GCCs became global powerhouses of AI innovation 

GCCs are offshore hubs established by global companies to manage technology, research, and business operations. Initially, GCCs were attracted by low labour costs, but now the most successful companies are those that provide value to their parent companies. At present, things have changed, and companies are investing in India for the country’s know-how in product engineering, resources in AI and software innovation, and numerous engineers who can develop and produce products for the world market. 

India’s GCCs and R&D centres demonstrate that product engineering is driving innovation across sectors. While India still isn’t well known for AI models like ChatGPT or Google’s Gemini, the country has proven successful in developing AI-based products. Indian engineers are not competing to produce large AI models; instead, they are developing innovative products that leverage AI. Numerous MNCs have been using AI for practical applications, and the Indian arms of global companies are piloting AI projects worldwide.  

India’s Global Capability Centre (GCC) has come a long way from when Texas Instruments established the first GCC in India in 1985. Today, India is home to almost 50% of all GCCs worldwide, with 2,117 GCCs across 3,728 units, and over 2.3 million employees. GCCs play an important role in India’s services export boom. With the sector’s revenue at $60 billion and expected to reach $100 billion, the GCCs contribute nearly 2% to India’s GDP. India’s GCC sector is booming and is expected to grow, earning $155–199 billion by FY30 and creating many job opportunities and adding strategic roles in IT, banking, AI, and engineering. 1,200 GCCs in the country are embedded in AI/ML technologies, supported by over 250 dedicated Centres of Excellence (COE) and a talent base of 250,000 AI professionals. 

The pace of GCC hiring in India has increased significantly over the past five years. Hiring is reported to be 3.4x higher than in 2021, with 227,991 jobs added in the first half of 2026 alone. Further, there has been a major shift in the skills landscape for GCC hiring. In 2021, just 11% of the GCC required AI capabilities. Today, over 64% of new roles in the GCC are expected to require AI competencies, indicating the increasing incorporation of AI into enterprise operations and the talent required to support it. 

The EY India GCC Pulse Survey 2025 finds that the GCCs of India are transitioning from AI experimentation to enterprise-scale adoption. The survey shows that 58% of the respondents were implementing Agentic AI. In addition, 83% of GCCs now use Agentic AI, and the number of pilot projects rose from 37% in 2024 to 43% in 2025. GCCs show a preference for utilising Generative AI when implementing business processes, with customer service leading, followed by finance, general business processes, IT and cybersecurity. Moreover, 67% of the GCCs have created innovation and incubation teams to develop and launch innovations from India. 

Below are examples that highlight the contributions of Indian engineering teams to the development of AI-led innovations across various industries in the GCC.  

Samsung’s R&D Centre in Bengaluru is one of the company’s largest research centres outside South Korea and supports India’s growing role in global product innovation in the AI era. The Centre contributes to AI-powered features, such as camera optimisation and smartphone intelligence, deployed across Samsung’s global product portfolio. 

India has emerged as a global hub for Philips’ AI innovation, with 85% of its healthcare solutions developed in the country. Indian engineers are applying AI to medical imaging, helping hospitals deliver faster and more efficient diagnostics. Engineers at Philips have developed AI solutions that can reduce MRI scan time to 30 minutes, and below 15 minutes in some cases. These products developed in India are now sold commercially worldwide. 

Since establishing its engineering and R&D Centre in Bengaluru in 1997, Adobe India has grown into a global innovation hub. The Bangalore Innovation Centre has played a key role in major product development initiatives. In 2026, Adobe opened a new R&D Centre in Noida, focusing on AI-driven product development workflow. For instance, one-third of the company’s product development takes place in India. 

Cargill is leveraging AI to transform product innovation, research, customer service, and operational efficiency, with its Global AI Centre of Excellence in Bengaluru playing a pivotal role. The company has developed generative AI tools that help customers, such as McDonald’s and KFC, create personalised menu ideas based on consumer preferences and identify new opportunities for ingredient innovation. Cargill deploys generative AI technology to enhance coding output by 10-15% while, in parallel, identifying opportunities to speed up Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) processes, thereby saving time and money. 

Target has made its Bengaluru Centre an indispensable element in its AI transformation. The teams based in India are responsible for some of Target’s most critical strategies, including AI/ML, in-house engineering, data science, computer-generated imagery, and more. 

Broadridge has turned its centres in India into hubs for technology innovation. Indian engineers have been instrumental in developing AI solutions such as BondGPT, which provides bond analysts with reliable financial data, and OpsGPT, which automates back-office reporting and helps financial institutions meet tight settlement periods. 

SAP has positioned India at the Centre of its global artificial intelligence strategy, with SAP Labs India emerging as the company’s largest R&D Centre outside Germany. Indian engineering teams contribute across every major product line. A substantial portion of Joule, SAP’s generative AI copilot, has been engineered in India, with local teams driving the expansion of AI-powered capabilities across hundreds of enterprise scenarios. 

Mastercard’s Pune Centre has become the company’s largest global technology hub. The Centre develops advanced AI solutions that analyse 1.6 trillion parameters and trillions of data points in real time to secure more than 160 billion transactions annually. Indian teams in Pune are at the forefront of developing AI-driven fraud-detection technologies that have helped Mastercard prevent over $20 billion in fraud each year while significantly reducing false transaction declines. 

As India continues to be a key player in the global AI-led transformation, and global companies are setting up Centres of Excellence (COEs) in large numbers, India should become a hub for supplying globally competitive AI talent to the GCCs. For example, JPMorgan announced that it will hire 1,000 technology professionals in India to accelerate its global AI and digital transformation initiatives, expanding its India GCC workforce to 56,000 employees and reinforcing India as one of its largest technology hubs outside the US. 

Talent Shortages Pose a Critical Challenge 

AI is helping GCCs make India a major hub for AI-based global businesses. But while various industries are adopting AI technologies at an unprecedented pace, they are also encountering a challenge: a shortage of talent to meet that demand. 

India faces an 82.9% shortage in generative AI skills despite having an AI workforce of 920,000 professionals, and only 46% of graduates are employable for AI and machine learning roles. A mere 16% of India’s IT professionals are AI-skilled, highlighting a significant gap between talent availability and industry demand. Also, India is facing a shortage of cybersecurity talent. 

India’s retail GCC ecosystem comprises 180 retail and consumer GCCs employing 272,300 professionals. However, the sector faces a critical shortage of experienced AI talent, with only around 320 professionals having over 8 years of AI experience, more than half of whom are based in Bengaluru. Demand for technology, data analytics and supply-chain skills is expected to drive over 80% of hiring by 2028, while competition from IT services and consulting firms is further tightening the talent pool and pushing up compensation for specialised skills. As a result, compensation is becoming increasingly skills-driven, with AI and machine learning professionals in high demand and commanding attractive compensation packages. 

According to a recent study by PwC, the average AI literacy level among leaders in GCC is only 27%. In addition, more than 90% of GCCs believe that fewer than 40% of their leaders have the requisite level of AI literacy to make strategic decisions. It highlights that GCCs may need to reskill over 40% of their workforce due to AI’s influence on the type of work.   

GCCs have been emphasising the development of cross-GCC executive academies for AI leaders, creating apprenticeship-at-scale approaches that connect academia to project work, and establishing industry-led sector skill consortia. 

As the demand for leaders who can operate globally and lead through ambiguity is growing faster than the pipeline,  

Ecosystem-wide collaboration is key. 

India has evolved into a global hub for innovation, with demand for qualified talent across numerous fields. The country boasts a mature and diverse talent pool for transactional roles such as HR, finance, and procurement. Still, it has a limited supply of specialised functions such as AI, deep technology, and cybersecurity. Attrition rates and talent retention are also major challenges for GCCs in India, especially in high-demand roles such as AI, cybersecurity, cloud, data engineering, and product development. The quest for AI-skilled talent is intensifying as companies across the startup and non-technical space, including manufacturing, FMCG, pharma, and retail, compete for in-demand talent.  

The success of GCCs will require more than hiring. There is a need for the simultaneous reskilling of the existing workforce, stronger industry-academia partnerships, deeper investment in leadership development, and coordinated action across GCCs, universities, skilling providers, and policymakers. The path forward is a shared agenda for skills transformation that can turn India’s talent advantage into a lasting innovation advantage. 

India already has a strong GCC ecosystem, and it will continue to grow. By being home to a vast STEM talent pipeline, the country ranks among the world’s top three destinations for both AI and STEM talent. The next competitive advantage will not come from producing more graduates, but from converting them into AI-ready professionals at scale. This calls for deeper Industry–Academia collaboration—embedding AI into engineering curricula, expanding hands-on experience, live industry projects and applied research. The goal must be clear: build a future-ready workforce that can power India’s next wave of AI-led GCC growth. 

This article has been authored by Dr Shruti Mantri (Senior Associate Director, ISB Institute of Data Science) and Ramesh Kotnana (Senior Manager, ISB Centre for Business Innovation)