Delivery hubs to AI reinvention hubs: Why GCCs in India must move to shape enterprise outcomes

We’ve been saying for some years that global capability centres (GCCs) in India are fast becoming integral to the global enterprise. In the AI era now, their role is changing sharply. The next generation of GCCs will not merely deliver solutions, they will also have to shape enterprise outcomes, redesign work, orchestrate ecosystems, and accelerate AI adoption at scale. That’s what we heard in a Times Techies discussion last week in partnership with Accenture.

Lalit Ahuja, founder & CEO of ANSR, one of the leaders in helping GCCs establish and operate, said AI adoption is a lot about context, and so GCCs will need to be even more integrated with business and be the repository for the enterprise context, to remain relevant in the AI age.

The shift, he said, is already visible. Newer GCCs are being designed as AI-first centres from the start. About 15-20% of existing GCCs, Ahuja said, are experimenting with AI across functions, while many others are in wait-and-watch mode. The difference, he said, is that new GCCs are being built with the right form, structure, job families and operating models for AI, while older ones must retrofit AI into legacy ways of working.

Paul Jeruchimowitz, senior MD at Accenture and leader of its GCC practice, said a recent Accenture survey of 250 GCC leaders found that 29% qualified as “catalysts of enterprise reinvention”. They are co-authoring the 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 said leading GCCs have two other traits. They influence how work gets done across the business, and they invest heavily in business and AI skills. In many cases, GCCs may be ahead of headquarters in AI fluency, allowing new ways of working developed in India to be ported back to the global enterprise.

Foundational Changes
For GCCs to scale AI, however, the foundations must change. Hari Krishna Verma Nadimpalli, MD of Inspire Brands’ India Innovation Centre, said the problem is not that AI is not smart enough. The problem is whether the enterprise around it is ready.

Inspire Brands, which owns Baskin-Robbins, Buffalo Wild Wings, Dunkin’ and other restaurant brands, is using data and AI to better understand customers, predict demand and estimate customer lifetime value. But Nadimpalli said the foundational issue is data quality, context and trust. The current model of AI, he noted, works best when it has context. But if you present context in the form of documents and siloed data pipelines, you may not get great results. Enterprises, he said, have to think about data as an asset, as opposed to documents as an asset, and think about how to build more robust data pipelines.

Governance also has to change. Traditional governance is built around control and prevention. AI, Nadimpalli said, requires instrumentation to catch errors by itself, feedback loops to generate better results, and surfacing of errors early.

Ludwig Heinzelmann, India head of Deutsche Boerse, said regulated industries face an additional challenge. Deutsche Boerse builds and operates capital market infrastructure, where systems must be auditable and trusted. In big organisations, he said, there is never a lack of data, “but there is a lack of organised and properly governed data.” Trust in AI output, he said, begins with trust in input data.

To scale AI, Heinzelmann said, Deutsche Boerse has created a chief digital transformation role whose remit runs across the organisation to drive consistency. He said India is central to that journey. The company’s Hyderabad centre, launched last August, is positioned as a “talent and innovation location at scale”, fully integrated into the global organisation.

A major new role for GCCs will also be ecosystem orchestration – because when change is so rapid, not everything can be built internally; some solutions would have to be bought, some would have to be orchestrated through partners.

Jeruchimowitz said GCCs have a unique advantage because they bring together technology, business functions and talent in one location, with access to startups, academia, platform companies and service providers.
Ahuja said GCCs are increasingly “bringing the power of the ecosystem together.”