India's GCCs Evolve: AI and New Cities Forge Innovation Hubs

BENGALURU, KA – January 09, 2026

A fundamental transformation is reshaping India's Global Capability Centers (GCCs), moving them far beyond their traditional role as back-office support and cost-saving outposts. A new wave of strategic integration, powered by artificial intelligence and expanding into emerging urban centers, is recasting GCCs as indispensable engines of enterprise innovation and value creation. This evolution, outlined in a new brief by global GCC leader ANSR, points toward a future where these centers are not just executing tasks but are actively architecting business transformation.

Once measured primarily on operational efficiency, the most advanced GCCs are now pivotal to their parent companies' strategic growth. This shift is driven by five interconnected trends that are redefining the capabilities, structure, and very purpose of these global hubs in 2026.

The AI-First Mandate: From Experimentation to Business Value

The most significant driver of this evolution is the move from scattered AI experiments to a "business-first" AI adoption strategy. According to ANSR's "5 Trends Redefining the GCC Landscape in 2026" brief, leading GCCs are no longer dabbling in generic AI pilots. Instead, they are embedding AI capabilities directly into the core architecture of the enterprise, with a clear mandate to drive measurable business outcomes.

This means aligning every AI initiative with key performance indicators related to revenue growth, customer experience, supply chain resilience, and risk mitigation. Industry analysis supports this trend, indicating that by 2030, nearly 90% of all enterprise applications will feature embedded AI capabilities. For GCCs, this transition is a strategic imperative. Rather than being a stand-alone innovation agenda, AI is becoming the mechanism to amplify strategies that already work, accelerating value creation while reducing operational friction.

The focus has shifted to robust problem definition and deep integration with enterprise systems. This ensures that new AI models, platforms, or tools are scalable and directly contribute to the bottom line, turning the GCC into a hub for generating digital intellectual property and continuous intelligence.

A New Breed of Leadership and Hybrid Operations

This strategic pivot demands a new form of leadership and a radically different operating model. The demand for GCC leaders who combine deep strategic thinking with cultural fluency and a sophisticated understanding of AI-enabled operating models is projected to rise significantly. These leaders are no longer just managers of offshore operations; they are strategic partners to the global C-suite, interpreting emerging market signals and translating them into clear, executable priorities.

Simultaneously, the internal structure of GCCs is being reshaped by the emergence of "hybrid agentic operating models." This model envisions a coordinated operational layer where human expertise and autonomous AI systems work in tandem. In this construct, human teams set the strategic intent, define ethical guardrails, and provide critical judgment, while AI agents handle continuous execution across complex workflows. These agents can manage everything from system monitoring and triage to orchestrating multi-step processes with minimal human intervention.

Real-world applications of this model are already taking root. In finance, AI agents identify suspicious transactions in real-time, with human compliance teams providing the final review to avoid false positives. In healthcare, AI assists with diagnostic imaging, but medical professionals retain ultimate oversight. This human-on-the-loop approach combines machine speed with human reasoning. The result is a transformation of the GCC's cost structure and talent architecture, where roles evolve from manual execution to orchestration and design. Analysts and managers find themselves supervising intelligent systems rather than performing every process step themselves.

India's New Tech Frontier: The Rise of Tier-2 Hubs

Fueling this transformation is a geographic expansion beyond traditional metropolitan hubs like Bengaluru and Hyderabad. A growing number of enterprises are adopting "hub-plus-one" or multi-hub models, establishing specialized capability centers in emerging Tier-2 cities such as Visakhapatnam, Coimbatore, Trivandrum, Indore, and Bhubaneswar.

This expansion is no longer driven solely by cost considerations. While these cities offer significant cost advantages in real estate and operations, their primary appeal now lies in access to fresh, high-quality talent pools, significantly lower attrition rates—often 10-15% less than in metros—and rapidly improving digital and physical infrastructure. State governments are actively courting GCC investment with supportive policies and incentives, further accelerating this trend.

This decentralization promises a more balanced and equitable distribution of economic growth across India. As AI and advanced digital infrastructure continue to narrow the capability gap between Tier-1 and Tier-2 locations, these distributed hubs are poised to play an equal role in innovation and strategic capability building, transforming the national tech landscape.

Culture and Capabilities: The Human Element in an AI World

Perhaps the most crucial element in this new paradigm is culture. The ANSR brief emphasizes that in an AI-first enterprise, culture is no longer a soft metric but a decisive performance multiplier. GCCs that treat culture as a strategic capability are the ones poised to lead.

This involves heavy investment in creating a "reinventor" workforce—one that is adaptable, curious, and comfortable working alongside intelligent systems. GCCs are aggressively launching formal upskilling programs in AI, machine learning, data science, and cybersecurity. This focus on continuous learning is critical to bridge the AI talent gap, with many organizations finding it faster and more cost-effective to upskill their existing workforce than to compete for a limited pool of external experts.

These initiatives are creating new career pathways, transforming roles in HR, finance, and operations to leverage AI for automation and data-driven insights. The ultimate goal is to foster an environment where employees are empowered to experiment and collaborate across borders, shaping how responsibly and rapidly AI is adopted. As infrastructure and incentives become baseline expectations, the ability to align a global enterprise ethos with India's deep talent aspirations will ultimately define which GCCs emerge as true strategic partners in the years to come.