Ashutosh Sinha| Director, Talent Compliance India |
Ask anyone in global business what they think of India, and there’s a good chance the word “outsourcing” comes up. For decades, that’s largely what India represented: a place to send work that needed to be done cost-effectively. Call centres, data entry, and back-office processing — useful, yes, but not quite strategic. That has changed. And, the shift has been bigger than most people outside the industry realize.
More Than a Numbers Game
The scale of what’s happened is worth pausing on. Industry data puts the number of Global Capability Centres (GCCs) at over 1,800, employing approximately 2.16 million people across the country. By 2030, that figure is expected to climb to between 2.5 and 2.8 million, with the market projected to cross $100 billion.
India has firmly established itself as the world’s leading destination for GCCs — the preferred choice when global companies decide where to plant roots. That last point matters. When the world’s largest companies consistently choose the same country, it stops being a trend and starts being a statement.
The Work Itself Has Changed
Numbers aside, what’s really shifted is the kind of work being done. A decade ago, “India office” often meant a team handling processes that headquarters didn’t want to think too hard about. Today, that same office might be running AI development, leading product engineering, or contributing to financial strategy.
Research from the EY GCC Pulse Survey 2025 found that over half of GCCs in India (52%) now hold shared accountability for global decisions, with another 26% formally consulted on strategic matters. These aren’t supporting functions dressed up with fancier titles; teams in Bengaluru and Hyderabad are genuinely shaping how their companies operate worldwide. It’s a different conversation entirely from where things stood even five years ago.
India and the AI Moment
The timing has worked in India’s favour, too. Just as artificial intelligence moved from buzzword to business priority, India was already sitting on one of the world’s deepest pools of technical talent. The same EY research shows that 83% of GCCs are now investing in Generative AI, with 58% already moving into Agentic AI — the more advanced, autonomous tier of deployment. The training and upskilling alongside this have been significant: 81% of GCCs have trained internal teams on GenAI.
And it’s not just the people. India is on track to attract up to $200 billion in data centre infrastructure investment, according to government projections. Global investment commitments from companies like Microsoft, Google, and Amazon — with India as a key market — further reinforce this momentum. India isn’t just producing the talent that powers the digital economy; increasingly, it’s hosting the hardware too.
What Makes It Work
There’s no single magic ingredient. India’s success with GCCs comes down to a combination of factors that happened to converge at the right time.
There is a talent pipeline of decades of investment in engineering and technical education that has created a workforce that’s hard to replicate at this scale anywhere else. But companies also point to operational efficiency and the ability to run seamlessly across time zones. Cities like Bengaluru, Hyderabad, and Pune have grown into genuine ecosystems not just places with offices, but places with research institutions, startups, and the kind of energy that attracts ambitious people.
Not Just Tech Anymore
Something else worth noting about this isn’t purely a technology story. India’s talent is showing up across industries in ways that would have seemed unlikely not long ago.
Financial services firms are running risk and compliance functions out of Indian offices. Healthcare companies are conducting serious data research here. Manufacturers are leveraging Indian teams for design and automation work. Even the entertainment industry has taken note — a visual effects studio in Hyderabad run by a major global streaming platform stands as one example of high-end creative work finding a permanent home in India. The versatility of the workforce has turned out to be one of its defining features.
The Spread Beyond Big Cities
For a long time, this growth was essentially a story about a handful of cities. Bengaluru got most of the attention, with Hyderabad and Pune not far behind. That’s starting to broaden. State governments have been actively courting companies to consider Tier-2 and Tier-3 cities — Ahmedabad, Jaipur, and Kochi, and the pitch is landing. Lower costs, less competition for talent, and stronger employee retention are real advantages to looking beyond the metros, and more companies are recognizing that.
The Honest Challenges
None of this means that everything is smooth. Real problems don’t disappear just because the headline numbers look good.
Skill gaps remain a genuine concern; the distance between what high-skill roles demand and what a large portion of graduates can offer is still wide. Automation is already beginning to affect certain categories of work, and there are no easy answers for what happens to those jobs. Talented professionals continue to seek opportunities abroad. Data centre capacity, despite significant incoming investment, still lags the volume of data being processed domestically. And navigating labour regulations, along with rising compliance complexity around data privacy (up from 32% to 42% in 2025 according to EY), adds another layer for companies trying to scale quickly.
Where This Goes
The projections are striking. Deloitte India estimates that GCC numbers could range from 2,400 to as many as 5,000 by 2030, not a modest uptick, but a fundamental expansion of India’s role in how global businesses are structured. At the upper end of that range, it would represent a near-tripling of today’s base.
What that points to is something more significant than growth statistics. India is moving from being a place where work gets sent to one where work gets shaped. Strategy, innovation, product direction these things are increasingly being influenced by people sitting in Indian offices, not just executed by them.
[ Opinions expressed personal. ]
[Sources: EY India GCC Pulse Survey 2025 (November 2025); Deloitte India GCC projections and Deloitte–Embark alliance announcement (August 2025); industry estimates from NASSCOM, Zinnov, and EY on GCC scale and employment; public announcements by Microsoft, Google, and Amazon on global cloud and AI investments with India as a key market; Government of India projections on data centre infrastructure investment.]
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