From back office to brain trust: Purpose, patents and profit are becoming the new metrics for GCCs as they mature

Global capability centres (GCCs, the tech & operations arms of MNCs) have helped power India’s technology ascent for years now, but the cost-arbitrage model that lured multinationals here is past its sell-by date. Indian hubs must now behave less like offshore centres or back-offices, and more like intellectual engines that invent, decide, and monetise. That was the consensus among leaders at the Nasscom-Times Techies GCC 2030 And Beyond conference in Bengaluru on Monday.

Manu Saale, MD & CEO at Mercedes-Benz Research and Development India (MBRDI), illustrated the stakes with a story that began in 2018, when headquarters asked whether a car could read hand gestures. Bengaluru engineers seized the brief, trained neural networks to run on an edge device, and two years later were on stage at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas flicking the sunroof and stereo on a concept saloon open and shut with nothing but a wave. “There was one slide that mattered – Where does this magic come from? – and underneath it read ‘MBRDI, Bengaluru’,” Saale recalled, still delighted that India, not Stuttgart or Palo Alto, cracked the problem first. “That is how you earn respect at headquarters – and how you keep it,” he said.

SAP Labs India MD and Nasscom chair Sindhu Gangadharan offered another concrete case. Eighty percent of the code for SAP’s Joule enterprise copilot, she said, is written in Bengaluru, where developers work shoulder-to-shoulder with global customers to refine queries that track inventory, chase leads, or calculate taxes in natural language. “We’re talking about taking innovations like Joule from India to the world,” she said, pointing out that a quarter of SAP’s patents now originate locally. The lesson for newer entrants, she argued, is to nurture end-to-end product thinking – engineers who can design, commercialise and localise software, not merely code it. That demands earlier and deeper partnerships with universities so graduates arrive GCC-ready: steeped in IP law, data-driven design and platform economics as well as algorithms.

All of the leaders said the most successful GCCs are the ones that are most tightly integrated with the enterprise; and that’s also when the enterprise gets the most value from its GCC. Lalit Ahuja said simplicity is its best ally. The ANSR founder, who helps multinationals set up GCCs in India, recounted a conversation with the chief executive of a leading global company who had trouble wrapping his head around the concept of a GCC. His eureka moment came when Ahuja suggested treating the GCC as “the 19th floor of your office” – just in another country. The company in question had an office on the 18th floor of a building and were contemplating expanding into the 19th floor.

“Hire people there as you would if you were expanding into a new floor, plug them into the same systems, obsess about the same customers, and watch culture do the rest,” he advised. The executive followed through – and the Bengaluru office is now literally nicknamed ‘the 19th floor’ inside the company. Ahuja’s moral: don’t over-engineer the set-up. Indian adaptability means new centres can “just arrive”, usually in as little as three months, borrow the battle scars of incumbents and leapfrog straight to innovation.

Sirisha Voruganti, who runs British bank Lloyd’s offshore global services, underscored how quickly autonomy for GCCs can deliver. Her team is leading the bank’s push into digital identity, an area where Britain lags but India excels thanks to Aadhaar. “We’ve invited Nandan Nilekani to brief our board on what a billion-scale ID system looks like,” she said, adding that Lloyd’s chose India precisely because local engineers live the mass-authentication challenge daily.How to stay relevant

What can the thousands of GCCs already in India, and the hundred or so added each year, do to stay on the front foot? The leaders sketched a few imperatives.

●Pick moon-shot problems that headquarters has not yet solved and deliver them end-to-end. Gesture recognition did more for Mercedes-Benz’s perception of India than a decade of incremental tasks.

●Focus on revenue generation, commercialise IP. Filing patents is laudable; licensing them or embedding them in products is what puts India on the revenue map. Joint industry-academia labs and cross-sector forums can help accelerate that path from lab to ledger. Nasscom president Rajesh Nambiar noted that increasingly, GCC success is measured in revenue. Boards no longer ask how many heads a GCC employs but which product lines it owns and what percentage of sales those lines drive, he said.

●Integrate by design. Ahuja’s 19th-floor metaphor suggests that cultural alignment and shared metrics matter more than physical proximity. When Indian engineers attend the same sprint reviews and read the same customer dashboards as colleagues abroad, they act – and are judged – as peers, not contractors.

●Cultivate leadership. Saale argued that India’s decisive edge will be forged by the people who run the GCCs. “The leadership factor in the whole game matters most. We need to get our leaders to lead differently, inspire differently and start sharing larger dreams with their teams about how they should see the world from Bengaluru or Pune,” he said. The best results will emerge when companies rotate managers across functions and geographies, reward risk-taking and make GCC stewardship a fast track to the C-suite. Ajay Vij, senior country MD for Accenture in India, said leadership was particularly important in today’s volatile times.

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