Global Capability Centres (GCCs) in India laid off thousands of employees in 2025 as their global parent companies grappled with sector-specific pressures, including trade tariffs and AI-led workforce restructuring.
Over 5,500–6,000 GCC employees were laid off last year in India across sectors such as engineering, automotive, aerospace, retail, and especially among the big tech giants as they recalibrated global teams and product strategies amid AI disruptions, data sourced from UnearthIQ, a GCC market intelligence firm and engineering services research platform EIIRTrend showed.
This comes in a year when India also saw record numbers of new GCCs being set up in the country and net new jobs growing significantly to 135,000-150,000 as more multinational companies eye India for quality talent acquisition, data from UnearthIQ showed.
Industry analysts see this as a near-term shift as companies are consolidating areas of work that are no longer strategic while quickly ramping up AI and AI solutions-focused teams.
Which GCCs had the highest layoffs?
Visual effects and animation giant Technicolor’s shutdown alone accounted for around 3,000 job losses. This was followed by AUMOVIO Ford having planned to layoff around 1,000 employees in India, Fidelity Investments had cut about 500 jobs last year, along with restructuring based layoffs across several GCCs including Wells Fargo, Target, Boeing, Renault Nissan, Avaya, Oracle among many others, especially American technology giants.
“Technicolor had the biggest layoff of over 3,000, remaining layoffs happened in small teams across 20 GCCs amounting to another 3,000 at least. Most big tech majors had cut jobs teams aligning to global ,” Gaurav Vasu, Founder and CEO, UnearthInsight and UnearthIQ told Moneycontrol.
According to Pareekh Jain, CEO and lead analyst EIIRTrend, 6,000 is still be a conservative estimate as the actual numbers for layoffs could be much higher.
What triggered these layoffs?
Industry experts see these layoffs as a sectoral “reset” as companies gear up to improve productivity in a post-AI world.
Teams built on older staffing assumptions are getting measured against sharper output benchmarks, leading to consolidation in areas that are no longer strategic, emphasised Hani Mukhey, Senior Director, People Success Partner – GCCs at GCC consulting firm Zinnov.
“AI is accelerating this reset. Across finance, HR, operations, compliance, analytics, and engineering, workflows are being redesigned. This does not automatically mean job cuts. It does mean a different skill mix. Some roles taper. Others scale quickly,” she said.
Overlapping with global costs and portfolio recalibration especially for technology majors like Microsoft, Meta, Amazon — restructuring becomes inevitable. Mukhey, hoewever, doesn’t necessarily see this as demand weakening. This is more a sign that GCCs being held at a higher bar, she said.
Jain concurred. He called most of the India-based layoffs a reflection of the macroeconomic headwinds affecting the parent organisations of these GCCs.
“GCCs are integrated with global economic environment. Indian teams are no longer seen as cost control exercises. Every team here is aligned with the global product teams. So whenever there is a layoff in the US headquarters, it impacts their Indian teams too,” Jain said.
Driving efficiency is at the core for operations and layoff decisions for global organisations. For instance, last year after spending billions to set up its AI division, Meta had to trim workforce by nearly 600 employees globally from its AI Superintelligence Labs.
“Technology product firms are shutting down experimental product divisions, laying off over 4,000-5,000 talent in those specific product groups. However, these same firms continue to grow their cloud, AI and enterprise AI solutions. Companies like Microsoft, Google, Amazon, Meta etc., despite laying off employees in select product divisions in India, grew at an aggregate level,” said Vasu.
Vasu added, “Interestingly, engineering and tech talent that were laid off got absorbed in less than a quarter due to huge demand from Greenfield GCC expansion of over 101 new GCCs entering.”
Will we see more GCC layoffs in 2026?
Experts expect the layoff trend to continue in the near-term until GCCs have fully restructured workforces to align with the new talent structures and operating models.
“Over time, this will stabilize once roles are clearly defined, skill gaps are addressed, and productivity metrics mature. What emerges will not be a smaller GCC landscape. It will be a sharper one, with clearer accountability and a stronger capability mix,” Mukhey said.
Alouk Kumar, CEO and MD of GCC advisory firm Inductus Group, believes overall trajectory for GCCs in India will remain positive, as demand would shift steadily towards higher-value and knowledge-intensive work.
“The coexistence of restructuring in some GCCs and expansion in others characterizes a market in transition, not contraction,” Kumar noted.
Overall India’s GCC sector continues to remain on the rise, with 1,800 GCCs currently employing 2 million professionals in the country. In 2025 alone, 101 new GCCs were launched while 115-120 existing GCCs expanded their operations in the region, as per UnearthIQ’s data.