Global firms’ AI centres are reshaping Indian IT industry, but who has the top jobs?

The report, prepared by IT industry lobby group Nasscom and consulting firm Zinnov, titled ‘The GCC Value Orbit’, says the sector has expanded by 32% over the last five years, with more than 500 new GCCs and 1,000 additional units set up during the period.

However, despite the rapid expansion of Global Capability Centres, policymakers believe that India still hosts relatively fewer global decision-making and senior leadership roles than it would like. While engineering, operations and product mandates have grown sharply, strategic control and top-level corporate authority often continue to remain headquartered overseas.

The report itself reflects this gap, noting that only 5% of GCCs have evolved into “transformation hubs” with CXO roles and functional sovereignty from India. Analysts say India’s next challenge will be moving beyond being a large execution and engineering base to becoming a location where multinational firms place more global business heads, AI leadership teams and enterprise-wide decision-making authority.

From cost arbitrage to strategic ownership

The report argues that India’s GCC story is no longer about low-cost outsourcing alone. Instead, global firms are increasingly assigning India centres ownership over products, AI systems, platforms and business outcomes. The report describes GCCs as evolving from “delivery engines” into “enterprise nerve centres”.

AI sits at the centre of this shift. According to the report, more than 1,200 Global Capability Centres in India now have AI and machine learning capabilities, while over 250 operate dedicated AI/ML Centres of Excellence (CoEs). India’s GCC ecosystem also employs more than 250,000 AI professionals, making the country the world’s second-largest enterprise AI talent base after the United States.

The report says India is increasingly anchoring the application and engineering layers of the global AI stack, with GCCs taking on work ranging from AI model engineering and enterprise AI deployment to chip design and AI-assisted software development. At the same time, firms are restructuring operations to become “AI-native”, with hiring increasingly focused on specialised AI and domain expertise instead of mass recruitment.

GCCs versus IT services firms

The rise of Global Capability Centres is also intensifying pressure on India’s traditional IT services industry, which has historically relied on labour-intensive outsourcing and time-and-materials contracts.

Multinational firms are increasingly moving strategic work in-house through GCCs, weakening the dominance of India’s large outsourcing firms and intensifying competition for talent. Engineers are being drawn to GCCs due to better pay, product exposure and perceived job stability.

The Nasscom-Zinnov report itself hints at this transition. It says commercial models are shifting from time-and-materials billing to “value-share” and “gain-share” arrangements, while GCCs are taking end-to-end ownership over products and transformation programmes.

Industry observers say this could disrupt the traditional business model of Indian IT majors, whose scale was built on large workforces handling outsourced technology operations.

However, the shift may not be entirely adversarial. Analysts say Indian IT firms are now being pushed up the value chain, away from commoditised maintenance work and towards consulting, AI integration, automation and platform engineering.