Sanjay Kalra
Vice President, Client Solutions & Strategy
8 min read
If you still think a Global Capability Center is primarily about cutting costs, the market has already moved on without you. Here’s what the data actually says — and why it should reshape your next strategic conversation.
The Setup
Everyone Knows India Is Big for GCCs. Almost Nobody Knows Why It Actually Happened.
The first thing most vendor decks will tell you about India’s GCC market is how many centers exist and what they cost to run. That framing, I’d argue, is exactly wrong. It starts with the least interesting question and leaves the most important one untouched.
So let me start differently. The Zinnov-NASSCOM GCC Landscape Report for FY2026 — the most comprehensive dataset in the industry — clocked India at 2,117 Global Capability Centers generating $98.4 billion in annual revenue and employing 2.36 million professionals. That’s 32% growth since FY2021. In a five-year window, more than 500 net-new centers came online. In the first two quarters of 2025 alone, roughly 50 new GCCs opened their doors.
The question worth sitting with is not whether that scale is impressive. It clearly is. The question is: what does it tell us about how global companies now think about the work that actually matters to them?
2,117
Active GCCs in India (FY2026)
Zinnov-NASSCOM FY2026
$98.4B
Annual GCC Revenue
Zinnov-NASSCOM FY2026
2.36M
Professionals Employed
Zinnov-NASSCOM FY2026
Here is the stereotype I want to challenge directly: the idea that the GCC boom is fundamentally a story about labor arbitrage. That story made some sense in 2010. It does not describe 2026. When 506 Forbes Global 2000 companies have built capability centers in India — and 90% of those centers operate as multi-functional hubs spanning technology, product engineering, analytics, and operations — you are not looking at a cost-reduction play. You are looking at a structural reallocation of where serious work gets done.
“India is no longer a destination for large MNCs seeking cost savings. It has evolved into the strategic capability core — where AI engineering, R&D, finance transformation, cybersecurity, data science, and digital product leadership now physically live.”
— RKHRM Global Capability Centers in India 2026 Report
Independent industry analysis, May 2026
Challenging the Stereotype
The “Cheap Offshore Arm” Narrative Has a Data Problem
Let me put some specific numbers in front of the conventional narrative and let them do the work.
India’s GCC sector now employs more people than the country’s entire commercial banking industry — and pays them significantly higher average salaries than traditional IT services. That is not a cost center dynamic. That is a talent premium story.
More pointedly: since 2015, the number of global leadership positions inside Indian GCCs has grown from 115 to over 5,000. The Zinnov-NASSCOM FY2024 report counted more than 6,500 global roles held by India-based GCC professionals, including 1,100 women in global leadership positions. By 2030, projections point to as many as 20,000 global leaders sitting in India-based centers.
And salary compression — the polite way of describing rapidly rising wages in high-demand GCC talent pools — is already visible. GCC roles in Bengaluru and Hyderabad are experiencing salary growth well ahead of the broader market. The demand for experienced GCC professionals already exceeds supply in several functions. That does not sound like an environment where cheap labor is the thesis.
None of this means cost does not matter. It still does, particularly in the early stages of a GCC build. But the companies that built for cost alone, and structured their India presence accordingly, are the ones quietly struggling with retention, capability gaps, and centers that feel disconnected from the rest of the enterprise. The companies winning with India built for strategic capability — and the cost efficiency followed naturally from that.
90% of India-based GCCs now operate as multi-functional centers spanning technology, operations, and product engineering. The back-office-only model is not struggling — it no longer exists at any meaningful scale. (NASSCOM-Zinnov India GCC Landscape Report, FY2024)
What Drove More Than 500 New Centers in Five Years
If the cost story does not fully explain the wave, what does? Three intersecting forces, in my view.
AI changed where the talent advantage lives
India is now the number one AI hiring market globally, according to the Zinnov-NASSCOM FY2026 dataset. The NASSCOM FY2024 report counted over 120,000 AI and ML professionals across India’s GCC ecosystem, along with more than 185 dedicated AI/ML Centers of Excellence. Roughly 80% of new GCCs launching in 2026 are prioritizing AI and ML capabilities at their core — a near-complete inversion of the 2010 model.
That shift matters enormously for how enterprise technology and operations leaders should frame their India strategy. Access to AI talent at scale, within an ecosystem of peer companies and academic institutions driving similar work, is a structural advantage that no reshuffling of onshore headcount can replicate.
The next wave of global capability will not come from size, but from speed, specialization, and strategic influence. Mid-market GCCs are no longer just delivery engines — they are emerging as cultural innovation labs and centers of excellence, driving R&D, product innovation, and enterprise digitization for global impact.
— Rajesh Nambiar, President, NASSCOM
NASSCOM-Zinnov Mid-Market GCC Report, 2025
The mid-market opened the door wide
Five years ago, GCC conversations belonged almost exclusively to very large enterprises. That has changed meaningfully. India currently hosts 583 mid-market GCCs — companies with global revenues between $100 million and $1 billion — employing more than 210,000 professionals. These centers account for 27% of all GCCs in India. Forty-five new mid-market centers opened in just the past two years, and 35% of all mid-market GCCs in India were established within the same period.
What that tells enterprise leaders in my peer group is this: if companies with a few hundred employees and a couple of hundred million in revenue have decided India makes strategic sense for them, the question of whether it makes sense for your organization is probably already answered. The remaining question is how and when.
Policy deliberately removed friction
The 2025 Union Budget included a national framework explicitly expanding GCC support beyond major metro hubs into Tier II cities. Karnataka, Telangana, Maharashtra, Gujarat, and Tamil Nadu have each proposed strategic initiatives to attract GCCs. Real estate demand from GCCs hit 28 million square feet in 2025 alone — 40% of total Grade-A office demand in India. Governments at every level are making the risk calculus easier, not harder.
40% of India’s total Grade-A office demand came from GCCs in 2025
Source: Flexiple India GCC Statistics Report, 2025
Where You Build Matters As Much As Whether You Build
Bengaluru and Hyderabad continue to dominate new GCC setups. Bengaluru alone accounts for a disproportionate share of total GCC activity across the country. Together with Pune, Chennai, Mumbai, and the Delhi NCR, these six cities still house approximately 95% of active centers. They offer deep talent pools, mature vendor ecosystems, and world-class infrastructure.
They also offer competition. You are entering the most active hiring markets in the country, with salary inflation that rewards organizations who understand the local compensation landscape rather than applying global benchmarks. Turnover risk is real. So is the cost of getting talent acquisition wrong in a market where experienced GCC professionals receive multiple competing offers regularly.
The more interesting signal right now is the Tier II wave. Ahmedabad, Coimbatore, Kochi, Jaipur, Visakhapatnam, and Bhubaneswar are all appearing more frequently in GCC location strategies. Over 215 GCC units have already established themselves in emerging locations. The pattern emerging from successful operators is hub-and-spoke: Tier I for leadership, product, and platform complexity; Tier II for scale operations, specialist teams, and resilience. That architecture does not just spread talent risk — it changes your long-term cost and flexibility profile in meaningful ways.
If your India strategy only sees one city, you are not just missing cost optimization. You are accepting concentration risk that a well-designed hub-and-spoke model would eliminate — and you are paying Tier I rates for work that does not require them.
The Capability Is Real. The Execution Gap Is Equally Real.
I have spent considerable time with organizations navigating GCC decisions, and I want to be direct about something that market reports tend to gloss over: the distance between a well-reasoned GCC strategy and a well-executed GCC is larger than most boards realize before they start.
Eighteen to twenty-four months is the typical journey from initial decision to a center running at operational maturity. That window covers entity formation, regulatory structure, tax planning, facilities, HR infrastructure, local leadership recruitment, and then the actual ramp. If your core business is already running at full capacity — and whose isn’t — that build adds pressure at every layer of your existing delivery portfolio.
There is also the leadership question that organizations consistently underweight. India-based GCC heads need to operate fluently in both global and local contexts simultaneously. The talent pool for that role exists, but it is not large, and it is aggressively competed for. The organizations that rush to announce a GCC because a peer did the same often spend the first year searching for the right site lead rather than building the center.
Three Paths. Different Implications. No Universal Answer.
The realistic operating model question for any enterprise considering India looks something like this:
Captive GCC Build
Build-Operate-Transfer
Managed Delivery
The table above is not a verdict on which path is right for your organization. It is a starting point for the conversation every enterprise technology or operations leader should be having right now. The answer depends on your headcount ambitions, your capital appetite, your internal leadership bench, and how much organizational bandwidth you have available before the next fiscal planning cycle.
What I find consistently underappreciated is the value of the managed delivery path as a precursor rather than an endpoint. You gain access to the same talent pools, the same infrastructure, and the same time zone advantages that GCCs enjoy — without the upfront capital commitment or entity risk. And you develop real information about how your organization operates in an India context before locking in a structure you will live with for the next decade.
My Take
The “Why India” Conversation Is Over. The “How” Conversation Is What Matters Now.
Zinnov put it plainly in their January 2026 analysis: the question “Why India?” has been replaced, in boardrooms and executive conversations globally, with “What more can we do from India?” That shift in framing is not semantic. It reflects a genuine change in how enterprise organizations understand the relationship between India-based capability and their own strategic roadmaps.
The Deloitte-Embark alliance commentary from August 2025 captured it well: one in three Fortune 500 companies now has a GCC in India. Revenue contribution from these centers has grown from $19 billion in 2015 to nearly $70 billion today. The economic trajectory points to $100 billion or more by 2030. These are not numbers associated with a cost-reduction program. They are numbers associated with a structural transformation in how global enterprises build and deploy capability.
My view, from working with enterprise clients across digital transformation and AI services, is that the organizations creating the most value from their India presence share three characteristics. They treat their GCC leadership as genuinely strategic, not as administrative overhead. They invest in integration — in building cultural and operational bridges between their India centers and the rest of the business — rather than allowing the center to drift into a satellite mentality. And they revisit their operating model assumptions regularly, because the India market in 2026 offers different options than the India market of 2021, and the right structure for your next phase may not be the structure that made sense at inception.
506
Forbes Global 2000 Companies with India GCCs
Zinnov-NASSCOM FY2026
5,000+
Global Leadership Roles Held from India (up from 115 in 2015)
NASSCOM-Zinnov FY2024
80%
New 2026 GCCs with AI/ML at Core
RKHRM GCC India Guide 2026
The companies that will look back on 2026 as the year they got their India strategy right are not the ones who followed the most aggressive growth plan. They are the ones who matched their operating model to their actual organizational readiness — and worked with partners who had already earned their experience in the markets they were entering.
Sources
- Zinnov-NASSCOM GCC Value Orbit Report, FY2026. 2,117 GCCs, $98.4B revenue, 2.36M talent, 506 Forbes G2000 companies, 32% growth since FY2021. Published May 2026. zinnov.com
- NASSCOM-Zinnov India GCC Landscape Report: The 5-Year Journey, FY2024. 1,700+ GCCs, $64.6B revenue, 1.9M employees, 90% multi-functional centers, 6,500+ global roles. nasscom.in
- NASSCOM-Zinnov Mid-Market GCC Report 2025. 480+ mid-market GCCs, 210,000 professionals, 27% of India’s total GCC count; 45 new mid-market GCCs in two years; 35% of mid-market GCCs set up within two years. zinnov.com
- Zinnov. “5 Shifts Defining India’s GCC Story in 2025.” ~50 new GCCs in H1 2025; 1,760 centers by end-2025; India declared GCC Capital of the World. January 2026. zinnov.com
- Flexiple. “India Global Capability Centers Statistics: Latest Numbers About GCC Growth.” GCCs accounted for 40% of India’s total office space demand in 2025, leasing over 28 million sq ft. 95% of GCCs concentrated in six major cities. $100B+ revenue projected by 2030. December 2025. flexiple.com
- RKHRM. “Global Capability Centres in India 2026: The Complete Industry Guide.” Revenues crossed $70B in early 2026; NASSCOM projects 2.8M employees and $105B revenue by 2030; 80% of new 2026 GCCs prioritize AI/ML. May 2026. rkhrm.com
- Deloitte India and Embark Strategic Alliance Press Release. GCC revenue from $19B in 2015 to $68B+; 1 in 3 Fortune 500 companies has a GCC in India. August 2025. deloitte.com
- Business of GCC. “GCC Market Size and Revenue 2026.” Projected FY26 revenue ~$98–100B; global GCC market valued at $600B+ in 2025. May 2026. businessofgcc.com
- mroads.com. “Global Capability Centers in India: Growth, Impact, and Future Outlook (2025 Edition).” Over 65% of India GCCs serve US-headquartered companies; global leadership roles grew from 115 in 2015 to 5,000+; up to 20,000 global leaders in India by 2030. mroads.com
- NASSCOM GCC Summit 2025. 15th edition brought together 1,300+ global leaders and 80+ speakers. Hyderabad, May 2025. einpresswire.com