Size gives way to ownership

That remains relevant, but it is becoming a less complete measure. India now hosts 2,117 GCCs employing 2.36 million professionals, according to the latest Nasscom-Zinnov report. Of those established since FY21, 96% began with product or portfolio mandates, while nearly half were built around AI. What a centre owns, what decisions sit there and how much of the enterprise it can influence now matter as much as its size.

AI is loosening the relationship between headcount and output. Centres will continue to hire, but greater responsibility will not require people to grow at the same pace. A centre of a few hundred people that owns a global platform or leads an enterprise AI mandate may carry more strategic weight than a much larger execution centre. The unit of scale is shifting from size to consequence. The traditional GCC model was built around handoffs: strategy set in one geography, execution across time zones and results handed back.

Those handoffs also defined where accountability and decision rights sat. As AI reduces those handoffs, a harder question emerges. If a team has the context, capability and proximity to the problem, why should judgment automatically sit elsewhere? That does not mean every decision should move to India, only that decisions can increasingly follow context and capability rather than legacy structures.

Many mature Indian GCCs have spent years engineering products, running platforms and supporting operations across the same global enterprises. That creates something more valuable than functional expertise alone: a horizontal view of the enterprise. That matters because AI becomes more powerful when context is connected across organisational boundaries, revealing opportunities that remain invisible inside individual silos.

The domain depth and operational discipline that brought GCCs this far therefore remain critical. What changes is what those strengths are now expected to enable. The report finds that 64% of India site leaders now hold dual mandates, combining site leadership with global functional responsibilities. Strategic importance depends on what the centre is trusted to own, and the constraint is increasingly organisational permission, not talent.

Handing over work is an operational decision. Handing over decision rights is a leadership decision. Talent follows mandate. Operational mandates attract operational leadership; genuine ownership attracts leaders who want to own outcomes. But they are no longer enough. Boards should also ask which global decisions are made in India, what the centre owns end to end and how much of the enterprise its leaders can see.

Whether India could support larger, more sophisticated GCCs has largely been answered. The next question is authority: how much of the enterprise is genuinely prepared to be led from India? Scale will still matter. Scale will still matter. But increasingly, its significance will come from what that scale enables - greater ownership, wider enterprise context and more consequential decisions. The writer is executive vice-president and managing director, India, Publicis Sapient Disclaimer: The views expressed are the author's own and do not reflect the official policy or position of Financial Express.