Global multinationals now run almost every critical function — AI research, legal ops, finance, product design — from India. The GCC industry hit $64 billion in revenue in FY25 and is on track.
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Global Capability Centres — the in-house offshore offices where multinationals run high-skilled work at India cost — have grown from around 1,000 in 2018 to over 1,700 as of 2026. They now employ 1.9 million people and generated $64 billion in revenue in FY25, nearly double the 2019 figure. Unlike traditional BPO, GCCs run core functions: JPMorgan's data science team in Mumbai analyses global trading patterns; Goldman Sachs' Bengaluru engineers build market-risk systems; Boeing's Hyderabad centre designs aircraft components. The AI boom has turbocharged this: every major US tech firm — Google, Microsoft, Meta, Amazon — has dramatically expanded its India AI research and engineering teams. The industry's projected revenue of $100 billion by 2030 would make it larger than India's traditional IT services exports.
The GCC story starts in 1985 when Texas Instruments set up a satellite design centre in Bengaluru — India's first global capability centre, though nobody called it that then. GE Capital followed in the 1990s, running financial processing at a fraction of US costs. The real wave came in the early 2000s: Citibank, American Express, and Motorola built large India centres for operations and IT support. These were back-office operations — cost plays, not strategy plays. The transformation happened in two stages. First, the 2010s shift: centres that had started as cost-saving units were producing good enough engineering talent that parent companies began moving product development, data science, and risk management to India. Second, the COVID-19 acceleration of 2020-21: the pandemic proved conclusively that fully distributed teams could handle critical functions. The cultural barrier — that senior work needed to happen near headquarters — dissolved almost overnight. By 2022, a new GCC was opening in India roughly every week.
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JPMorgan Chase employs over 55,000 people in India — its largest employee base outside the US. Goldman Sachs has 10,000 engineers in Bengaluru, the firm's second-largest tech hub. Walmart Global Tech in Bengaluru employs 30,000 and runs e-commerce, supply-chain AI, and payments systems. Google India R&D in Hyderabad and Bengaluru is expanding AI infrastructure teams. Apple India runs a large operations and supplier-quality team from Bengaluru. On the services side, ANSR and Zinnov are the dominant GCC-as-a-service firms that help foreign companies set up Indian centres. NASSCOM tracks and advocates for the sector; it projects 2,500 GCCs by 2027.
In 2010, a typical Indian GCC was a support centre — handling IT maintenance, HR processing, finance shared services, and customer queries. The work was real but the function was transactional. The India team executed; the strategy happened at headquarters. By 2026, the picture has changed substantially. JPMorgan's India team builds trading algorithms. Google's Hyderabad engineers write the core ML infrastructure that powers global Google Search. Boeing's Hyderabad engineers design aircraft structural components. Goldman Sachs' India platform engineering team built a major portion of the firm's current internal technology stack. The shift is from execution to creation. Average GCC employee compensation has risen from ₹6-8 lakh in 2010 to ₹18-22 lakh in 2026, reflecting the increased seniority and complexity of work. The cultural shift is also visible: Indian GCC leaders now attend global product strategy meetings, not just implementation reviews.
NASSCOM projects 2,500 GCCs and 2.5 million employees by 2027. The $100 billion revenue target by 2030 would require another 50% growth in three years — achievable if global AI investment continues to accelerate and India can graduate enough STEM talent. The risks: a US H-1B policy that makes it harder for GCC employees to visit US headquarters (creating friction); competition from Poland, Vietnam, and Mexico for European and US companies seeking geographic diversification; and AI automation reducing the need for low-to-mid complexity GCC roles. The opportunity: as India GCCs mature, more of them are shifting from delivery to innovation — building products and IP, not just running processes. By 2030, a meaningful fraction of India's GCCs may be generating patents and product revenues rather than service fees.
GCCs represent India's most successful strategy for plugging into the global knowledge economy without building globally competitive product companies. The model works because it solves a real problem for multinationals (access to talent cheaper and at scale) without requiring India to solve its hard problems (weak domestic capital markets, difficult IP enforcement, fragile consumer purchasing power). The risk of this model is that it creates a dual economy: 1.9 million high-wage workers in a sea of lower-productivity employment. The transformative question is whether GCC scale eventually spills over — producing enough engineers, capital, and network effects that Indian-founded product companies emerge at global scale. That happened in Israel (Waze, Mobileye), Ireland (Stripe's roots), and partially in Singapore. India has produced Freshworks, Zoho, and Zepto — but not yet a TSMC or a Samsung. The GCC boom is the precondition; the product-company wave is the aspiration. This matters because India's next growth leap depends on converting service hubs into globally owned products.
Chronology
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TI establishes what is effectively India's first GCC — a satellite design centre in Bengaluru. It is a proof of concept that global companies can run high-skilled work remotely from India.
The 2000s see the first wave of large GCC setups as Bengaluru and Hyderabad develop the infrastructure. The sector reaches 100 GCCs by 2003.
The pandemic proves that GCC teams can operate with full effectiveness while distributed. Companies drop hesitancy about expanding Indian centres for senior and critical roles.
NASSCOM data confirms that India's GCC sector crossed $50 billion in annual revenue in FY23, for the first time surpassing the standalone BPO industry in value.
1,700th GCC registered in India; NASSCOM reports 65% of all new GCC setups in the past 12 months include an AI or data science mandate.
Step 1/5 events
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