India’s Global Capability Centres (GCCs) are rapidly evolving from back‑office cost centres into front‑line innovation engines, with a growing share now owning digital modernisation, product co‑creation and customer experience mandates. A new report by NTT DATA and The Mainstream finds that GCCs are moving up the value chain on the back of AI‑led transformation, leadership development and tighter alignment with ESG and responsible AI priorities.​
GCCs Shift from Execution Units to Innovation Engines
According to the India GCC Innovation Transformation Report 2025, around 40 percent of GCCs are already driving global digital modernisation, product co‑creation and experience design, rather than simply executing centrally defined tasks.
AI is emerging as a key differentiator across this ecosystem, with maturity levels broadly distributed across four stages—exploration, pilots, functional integration and enterprise‑scale deployment—with roughly 22–25 percent of GCCs in each bucket.
India now hosts nearly 2,000 GCCs employing close to two million professionals across technology, engineering, consulting, manufacturing and BFSI, signalling the strategic weight these centres hold in global operating models.​
Talent, Leadership and ESG Become Core Levers
Despite the depth of India’s talent pool, the report identifies a capability gap around end‑to‑end outcome ownership, with about 42 percent of GCCs citing a shortage of specialised deep‑tech skills that limits their ability to take full product or platform mandates.
To address this, more than 70 percent are actively investing in local leadership capacity, with 42 percent running structured leadership programmes and 31 percent relying on mentor–mentee approaches to grow product visionaries and technology strategists. GCCs are also embedding ESG, green operations and responsible AI into their charters, aligning innovation initiatives with sustainability and purpose‑driven metrics as they scale.​
Measuring Innovation ROI and Scaling Operating Models
Leading GCCs are beginning to design frameworks for tracking innovation ROI, linking experimentation and pilots more explicitly to enterprise value and global impact. The report notes a shift towards cross‑functional skill building and distributed leadership pipelines, as GCCs tap talent across multiple Indian cities and train teams for end‑to‑end accountability.
Built on input from over 250 GCC leaders and practitioners in hubs such as Bengaluru, Hyderabad, Pune and Delhi, the research combines interviews, national surveys and leadership roundtables to map how operating models, AI adoption and sustainability practices are converging to turn India into a global laboratory for enterprise innovation.
