If you follow the Indian IT sector, you must be familiar with the term GCC. And if you are not, let us spell it out. GCC stands for Global Capability Centre, and in recent years and months India has become the favourite destination for companies worldwide when it comes to setting up one. So much so that at a time when AI headwind is making Indian IT giants shake and waver, GCCs are keeping the Indian IT story going, even in terms of IT jobs creation.
The Indian IT sector so far has relied on SaaS – Software-as-a-Service – for decades. But the world is changing, and instead of SaaS, many companies are now trying to rely on their own teams instead of outsourcing their IT work. But even as they look inwards, and create new teams and new centres, they are increasingly looking at India.
“A Global Capability Centre is essentially a company’s own offshore strategic unit,” explains Abhishek Agarwal, president at Judge India & Global Delivery, a tech consulting company. “GCCs handle everything from technology development, data analytics, and finance operations to legal, HR, and, increasingly, core product innovation.”
Essentially, GCC is a company’s offshore unit that can handle a variety of tasks, with a particular focus on tech. It’s just that, unlike the usual SaaS work, here, the company itself handles everything. There is no second or third party. GCCs are all about first-party operations. In recent years, from giants like Amazon, Microsoft, Dell, and SAP to non-tech firms like Bank of America and Verizon have established GCCs in India to handle their tech and IT work.
The growth in the last few years has been phenomenal. “India now has more than 2,100 GCCs, employing in excess of 2.3 million professionals and generating nearly $100 billion in revenue,” Rohan Lobo, Deloitte partner and who looks at the GCC sector closely, tells India Today Tech.
The numbers on the jobs too, paint a clear picture. According to the Tech Outlook report by Xpheno, a company that tracks manpower in the IT sector, India in May saw 5 per cent IT job growth compared to the month last year. Although, compared to April 2026, there was a slight reduction of 2 per cent. The fact that the number of active jobs available in the IT sector is stable is due to the demand from GCCs because the big tech giants are either holding firm or slashing roles.
Xpheno highlights the role of GCCs. Its report notes that even though open roles within the IT services sector fell by 17 per cent in May, the demand from GCCs increased by 29 per cent year-over-year and 20 per cent month-over-month. “The IT sector and its cohorts are set to maintain current volume and velocity for the rest of the quarter and potentially take the trajectory further into the next quarter as well,” notes the report.
GCCs not new, their growth is
While the concept of a GCC in India is not new, their growth in the last few years have brought them into limelight. The story begins in the 1980s. It was Texas Instruments in 1985 that first set up a wholly owned R&D center in India, located in Bengaluru. And quickly, this Indian GCC became a vital part of operations, from Digital Signal Processors to Mixed-signal Integrated Circuits.
Now over 40 years later, almost all big MNCs have their GCCs in India. Largely thanks to Indian talent. Girija Kolagada, country manager at Progress Software, tells India Today Tech, “India’s rise as the world’s preferred GCC destination is built on three things hard to replicate anywhere else — a vast pool of deeply skilled technology talent, a culture of engineering excellence, and an ecosystem that has matured rapidly over the past decade.”
Hitachi Vantara, which has a large GCC in Bengaluru, highlights the strength of Indian talent. “For Hitachi IQ almost 90 per cent to 95 per cent of development work happens in Bangaluru. Indian talent is critical for a global company like Hitachi to be able to develop these kinds of technologies and then deploy them globally as part of our solutions,” Hemant Tiwari, MD India and SAARC at Hitachi Vantara, tells India Today Tech. “For VSP360, too, the development team is largely (based) in India.”
Helped by AI and not harmed
The good part about India’s GCC story is that compared to its IT services industry, this one might be more immune to AI-driven change. Neelabh Shukla, chief business officer at Careernet, expects GCC growth to continue. He tells India Today Tech, “The headcount at several large centres will grow 20 to 25 per cent over the past two years.”
Neelabh explains, “Where traditional IT services firms have long relied on bulk hiring, GCCs are built around niche, specialised talent in AI engineering, data science, cybersecurity, cloud infrastructure, and product development.”
Abhishek Agarwal concurs. “AI, rather than threatening GCCs, is actually expanding their mandate. Companies are sending more complex, higher-value AI-related work to their India GCCs precisely because the talent is there, and the centres have earned trust over years of consistent delivery,” he says.
As more and more companies, partly spurred by AI, are willing to take control of their IT needs. They are increasingly, again thanks to AI tools that reduce the need to have very large teams, are looking to do jobs in-house instead of outsourcing them to IT service companies. But while AI can do a lot of heavy-lifting, it still needs a skilled workforce to guide it, and the cheapest such workforce is in India.
QualiZeal co-founder Madhu Murty Ronanki says, “As enterprises scale AI adoption, the focus will shift toward trusted, governed, and quality-assured AI systems — where specialised Quality Engineering capabilities will play a critical role.”
This premise is fuelling companies setting up their own GCCs in Indian cities. According to Rohan Lobo, as GCCs enter the new AI era, there is even more scope for growth. He says, “Growth will not be limited to Bengaluru, Hyderabad, Pune or NCR. As the model matures, Tier 2 and Tier 3 cities will also become part of the GCC growth story.”