Synopsis
Global capability centres (GCCs) in India are moving up the corporate ladder, with nearly 20% of such centres enjoying real strategic authority, up from just 5% a decade ago, according to data from ANSR and Deloitte India. The number of global leadership roles based in India has zoomed to over 6,500 from just 115 in 2015 and is poised to reach 30,000 by 2030 with AI expected to boost the trend, industry estimates suggest.The number of global leadership roles based in India has zoomed to over 6,500 from just 115 in 2015 and is poised to reach 30,000 by 2030 with AI expected to boost the trend, industry estimates suggest.
US retail giant Walmart manages its global retail technology from Bengaluru and Chennai while rival Target’s Bengaluru centre manages important aspects of its digital commerce and supply chain platform, said Vikram Ahuja, co-founder of ANSR, which offers end-to-end GCC solutions for multinationals.
Microsoft develops key parts of Azure in the country while Amazon builds Alexa and Prime Video technology, he added.
An EY study found that 45% of GCCs in India now take part in global decision-making.
However, the transformation is uneven.
Roughly 40-45% of centres still handle back-office and IT support, according to Rohan Lobo, partner and GCC industry leader at Deloitte. Another 35-40% contribute to engineering and product development but do not control pricing, market entry, or customer relationships.
Experts also made a distinction between participation and ownership.
“These centres are technically sophisticated but commercially constrained,” Lobo said. “The hard truth is that many leaders in GCCs still have limited strategic budget authority. Until India-based leaders earn a seat at the table when product roadmaps are set, and capital is allocated, they will remain policy recipients rather than policy makers.”
Several new GCCs start with clear strategic roles rather than being support centres. “Centres given a specific outcome to own from the start, such as leading a cloud migration or running a global AI deployment, reach strategic maturity significantly faster than those handed broad mandates and told to innovate over time,” Lobo said.
Such centres now account for 30-35% of all new setups, up from under 10% a decade ago, he added.
Pareekh Jain, CEO of EIIRTrend, pointed out that Samsung’s India centre owns actual product lines and shapes new technology.
“Alstom and Wabtec have given their India teams responsibility for products serving the local market, which forces a different kind of accountability,” he said. “At Microsoft and Google, the depth of Indian engineering talent has made the centres indispensable.”
Some experts, though, believe there’s a limit to leadership roles coming to GCCs.
Not all decisions can or should move to India, said Gaurav Vasu, founder of UnearthInsight. A bank will always make credit card decisions close to its home market and a retailer will always make shelf decisions where its stores and customers are.
“These mandates have to be realistic mandates,” Vasu said. “The India GCC does not do the business part of it. Business decisions tend to stay where the business is.”
Artificial intelligence is changing that equation. Much of the work to create and deploy AI systems for global companies is being done in India. This is making the shift in power to where the work is done.
India’s centres have shown what they can do for ten years. Experts argue that the next step will depend on whether the global headquarters are willing to give AI-driven work more power as it grows.
