Last week witnessed significant discourse on global capability centres (GCCs) at a Nasscom conference and sessions organized by Times Techies. The discussions centered on how GCCs must embrace artificial intelligence and what this means for India's talent pool. Experts emphasized that GCCs need to move beyond mere service delivery to actively shape enterprise outcomes.
GCCs: From Solution Delivery to Outcome Shaping
The role of GCCs in India is rapidly transforming in the AI era. The next generation of GCCs will not just deliver solutions but also shape enterprise outcomes, redesign work, orchestrate ecosystems, and accelerate AI adoption at scale. This was the key takeaway from a Times Techies discussion held last week in partnership with Accenture.
Lalit Ahuja, founder and CEO of ANSR, a leader in helping GCCs establish and operate, noted that AI adoption is heavily context-dependent. To remain relevant in the AI age, GCCs must integrate more deeply with business functions and become repositories of enterprise context. He observed that this shift is already underway, with newer GCCs being designed as AI-first centres from inception. Approximately 15-20% of existing GCCs are experimenting with AI across functions, while many others are in a wait-and-watch mode. The key difference, Ahuja pointed out, is that new GCCs are built with the appropriate form, structure, job families, and operating models for AI, whereas older ones must retrofit AI into legacy workflows.
Catalysts of Enterprise Reinvention
Paul Jeruchimowitz, senior managing director at Accenture and leader of its GCC practice, shared insights from a recent Accenture survey of 250 GCC leaders. The survey found that 29% of GCCs qualify as “catalysts of enterprise reinvention,” actively co-authoring AI strategy. “They are coming to the business, to headquarters, with an agenda, not sitting back and waiting to receive the agenda,” Jeruchimowitz said. He added that leading GCCs exhibit two other traits: they influence how work is done across the business and invest heavily in business and AI skills. In many cases, GCCs may be ahead of headquarters in AI fluency, enabling new ways of working developed in India to be ported back to the global enterprise.
Foundational Changes Required for AI Scaling
For GCCs to scale AI, foundational changes are necessary. Hari Krishna Verma Nadimpalli, managing director of Inspire Brands’ India Innovation Centre, emphasized that the problem is not AI’s intelligence but the enterprise’s readiness. Inspire Brands, which owns Baskin-Robbins, Buffalo Wild Wings, and Dunkin’, uses data and AI to understand customers, predict demand, and estimate customer lifetime value. However, Nadimpalli stressed that data quality, context, and trust are foundational issues. AI works best with context, but if context is presented through siloed documents and data pipelines, results may be suboptimal. Enterprises must treat data as an asset rather than documents and build robust data pipelines. Governance also needs to evolve from control and prevention to instrumentation that catches errors, incorporates feedback loops, and surfaces errors early.
Ludwig Heinzelmann, India head of Deutsche Boerse, highlighted additional challenges for regulated industries. Deutsche Boerse builds and operates capital market infrastructure requiring auditable and trusted systems. In large organizations, there is never a lack of data, “but there is a lack of organised and properly governed data.” Trust in AI output begins with trust in input data. To scale AI, Deutsche Boerse created a chief digital transformation role with cross-organizational remit to drive consistency. Heinzelmann noted that India is central to this journey, with the company’s Hyderabad centre, launched last August, positioned as a “talent and innovation location at scale” fully integrated into the global organization.
Ecosystem Orchestration as a New Role
A major new role for GCCs will be ecosystem orchestration. Given rapid change, not everything can be built internally; some solutions must be bought or orchestrated through partners. Jeruchimowitz said GCCs have a unique advantage as they bring together technology, business functions, and talent in one location, with access to startups, academia, platform companies, and service providers. Ahuja added that GCCs are increasingly “bringing the power of the ecosystem together.”
