India’s Global Capability Centre (GCC) sector has entered a new age. What began as an efficiency play matured into a strategic engine that fuels product innovation, AI-powered transformation, and enterprise-wide change. In FY 2024, GCCs generated $64.6 billion in value, underscoring their significance to global business growth agendas.
Why Leadership Must Recalibrate Now
Over half of GCCs in India now drive enterprise portfolio and operating model reinvention initiatives, signaling a decisive move from support functions to strategic ownership. The shift also reflects in scale and ambition: industry reports show that the Indian GCC ecosystem is heading for a $100 billion market and workforce exceeding 2.5 million by 2030.
With this growth, expectations of GCCs have risen – they must deliver not just service efficacy but also ROI that reflects business improvements. These centers need to shape product roadmaps, build new platforms, lead AI adoption, influence regulatory readiness, and accelerate revenue enablement.
Capturing the next wave of progress requires clarity on where leaders should focus.
And that brings us to the five focus areas that will define the next decade of GCC leadership:
- Capability Over Cost
The era of positioning India-based GCCs primarily as cost-effective service delivery centers is over. Global companies no longer need associates to sit overnight in contact centers handling backend tasks or answering calls and emails from overseas customers. They need talent that can accelerate business growth by anchoring itself across a range of capabilities – platform development, AI engineering, data ops & MLOps, regulatory analytics, cybersecurity, ESG reporting, and cross-functional product ownership.
Leaders must prioritize building a clear capability roadmap tied directly to business strategy. That, among other things, would require reallocating 15-25% of hiring budgets toward senior, niche, and architect-level roles. They will also need to redesign KPIs to ensure that teams take responsibility for tangible results rather than tasks.
- Talent Architecture
The talent equation for GCCs has changed. High-performing engineers, analysts, and product specialists no longer want predictable roles — they stay in an organization that gives them ownership, mobility, and visibility. When a GCC operates with narrow delivery job descriptions, it limits its own growth and pushes strong talent back into the market.
Building role families (such as product lead, data product owner, and platform architect) and offering structured global rotations can boost retention and deepen capability. Leaders should also start tracking mobility metrics — time-to-first-promotion, cross-functional moves, and internal fill rates for critical roles.
With this level of clarity, GCC becomes a genuine and more fulfilling career destination.
- Impact-Oriented Governance & Metrics
Some GCCs still evaluate their success in terms of FTE counts, hours logged, and number of tickets closed – these delivery-based scorecards track effort rather than impact. To lead enterprise change, governance must change from activity metrics to business results.
The indicators tied to value delivery include time-to-market improvements, revenue enablement, regulatory readiness, platform stability, cost-to-serve reduction, and measurable uplift in customer experience. These are the measures parent companies care about, and they’re the only ones that position a GCC as a true strategic partner.
Leaders can execute this approach by establishing an “impact-to-activity” KPI pyramid that links enterprise goals to capabilities and then to tasks. What gets measured is what gets funded, leading to results that matter.
- Tech and Data Foundation
A robust tech stack and data strategy are non-negotiable for GCCs to operate at enterprise scale. Point solutions created to meet individual team requirements only increase complexity. What leaders need instead are cloud-native applications, modular data products, reliable cybersecurity layers, and mature MLOps practices that support safe and repeatable model deployment – a foundation built with these elements enables teams across departments to manage and refine their task outcomes more consistently.
Whether IT is administered internally or through managed service providers, GCCs need a dedicated platform engineering team that owns standards, tooling, uptime, and reusability across business units. For example, leaders can commit to a three-year platform roadmap, systematically retire legacy tools, and fund shared capabilities to sharpen their GCC’s long-term advantage.
- Ecosystem Leverage and City Strategy
GCCs can move beyond their internal talent and processes to tap into the advantages of India’s broader ecosystem. Start-ups, academia, state innovation programs, and tech partners fast-track capability building while reducing experimentation costs.
Leaders should also reassess their location strategies by balancing operations between Tier-1 hubs for client proximity with Tier-2 cities that offer high-quality talent, lower attrition, and better cost structures. A practical next step is to retain some external innovation budget and pilot a dual-city operating model to diversify talent access and strengthen organizational resilience.
A Decade of Opportunity Ahead
Statistics have already shown significant growth among the major GCCs since their establishment at the turn of the millennium. The momentum, however, now signals a more profound change in how global companies will operate over the next decade.
As organizations revamp their business models for AI-intensive, digitally fluid markets, India becomes the region where much of that re-wiring will actually be built, tested, and scaled. GCCs have a clear advantage here: proximity to talent, ownership of mission-critical work, and the ability to architect scalable platforms that support long-term growth.
What’s important to remember is that opportunity doesn’t guarantee impact. The leading GCCs of the next decade will be those that make calculated choices about capability planning, talent philosophy, operating discipline, and technology foundations. The window is open, and the next moves matter.