Global Capability Centres (GCCs) in India continue to be at the heart of global enterprise transformation. As organisations navigate a rapidly evolving business landscape shaped by digital acceleration and sustainability priorities, GCCs are becoming strategic hubs that deliver more than operational excellence. In 2025, GCCs strengthened their role as innovation catalysts, culture architects, and talent accelerators – positioning India as a global innovation powerhouse.
2026 will test the maturity and ambition of this ecosystem and be the inflection point at which GCCs must evolve into AI-native, trust-anchored, and hyper-resilient business platforms that shape the future of global enterprises.
2025: A Year of Strategic Maturity
In 2025, India’s GCC ecosystem achieved strategic maturity as AI adoption expanded significantly, transitioning from experimental pilots to enterprise level deployment. GCCs began delivering measurable value through intelligent operations, advanced Customer Experience (CX) solutions, and predictive risk capabilities, enabled by scalable AI architectures. Alongside this shift, talent and capability development became more adaptive and future focused. Organisations invested in capability academies and skills-based models to boost agility and build a strong digital talent pipeline.
GCCs deepened their role as strategic value partners to global headquarters. Their mandate broadened from execution to end-to-end support, enabling effective decision making for enterprise transformation. With accelerated AI adoption, came a heightened emphasis on trust, governance, and responsible innovation. GCCs were instrumental in establishing transparent, compliant and explainable AI frameworks across the enterprise. Together, these developments created a strong foundation for the next wave of evolution that 2026 is expected to unleash.
In 2026: GCCs As Brand Multipliers And Talent Anchors
India’s GCCs and GBS’ are becoming global brand multipliers, crafting purpose-led, locally resonant narratives. This shift is elevating their People Value Proposition (PVP), transforming perceptions from service hubs to innovation ecosystems, while enhancing brand equity and attracting top talent. As competition for skilled professionals especially in technology intensifies, and roles evolve from Data Scientists to Design Scientists, BI analysts to Agentic AI Workforce Designers and Responsible AI Validators, future-ready GCCs must embed adaptive talent models. These models should establish clear ways of working: humans only, agents only and ones which embody human-AI chemistry, with continuous learning at the core.
GCCs As Adaptive, Intelligent Business Hubs
GCCs and Global Business Services (GBS’) are evolving from being delivery hubs to business hubs that embed intelligence into the fabric of operations from their inception, to turn them into adaptive, insight-led foundations for the enterprise. It is therefore imperative that GCCs forge a real-time intelligence layer that catapults themselves from reactive decisioning to decision augmentation.
Responsible AI: Building Trust And Sustainability
Embedding responsible AI frameworks into their operating models will be hygiene for enterprises in 2026. GCCs should focus on integrating principles of transparency, fairness, and sustainability into AI lifecycle management. Ethical innovation and governance models will become essential to maintain unified data platforms to generate enterprise value and create impact. This will reinforce GCCs as trusted enablers of digital transformation, propelling them from model oversight to decision oversight.
Defining The AI-Native Enterprise
GCCs and GBS’ can accelerate AI deployment by nurturing an inclusive, collaborative, and responsible environment while ensuring interoperability, scalability, and ethical resilience across AI lifecycles. Integrating these advances – end-to-end platforms, hyperscale infrastructure, Edge and Sovereign AI, digital twins, talent evolution and Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) exploration, – will evolve GCCs from service delivery to outcome ownership.
As AI maturity deepens and workforce models evolve, 2026 will be a defining year for India’s GCCs. Building on the momentum of 2025, marked by AI adoption, capability development, and trust-driven innovation, GCCs are poised to lead the next wave of value creation. Those that pivot to AI-native readiness as a board level KPI, while embracing principled AI and human-centric transformation, will set new benchmarks, shape the future of intelligent business and lead CXO discussions with confidence across global enterprises.
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