GCC Doesn't Have a Talent Problem. It Has a Capability Architecture Problem.

Why the next generation of Global Capability Centres will be won by capability design — not headcount

By Sharmilaa Thakur | CHRO | People & Culture Transformation Leader | Future of Work & AI Workforce Advocate | GSSC GCC Transformation Expert |

There was a time when the GCC conversation was largely about one question:

How many people can we hire, how quickly can we hire them, and at what cost?

I have lived through that era. And I have built in it.

At Cincom, I helped establish a Delhi shared-services centre and saw it scale from five sales resources to more than 1,000 IT professionals, with end-to-end HR operations supporting the growth.

At Assign Ventures, I helped establish a Noida offshore development centre that grew from approximately 200 to more than 1,000 resources, alongside the organisation-development, HR technology, competency, career and succession architecture that had to be built alongside it.

At Bureau Veritas, I was involved in building and scaling shared-services centres across India, France and Malaysia.

Those experiences taught me something that today's GCC market data is now making increasingly difficult to ignore:

Scaling a workforce is not the same as scaling organisational capability.

That distinction is about to become one of the most consequential issues facing GCC CEOs, CHROs, CIOs and Boards.

India Has Already Won the Scale Game

The numbers are extraordinary.

India now has 2,117 GCCs operating across 3,728 units, employing approximately 2.36 million professionals and generating $98.4 billion in revenue. The number of GCCs has grown 32% since FY2021, with 506 Forbes Global 2000 companies now operating in India. (NASSCOM–Zinnov, GCC Value Orbit Report, FY2026)

Those numbers tell us something important.

The GCC is no longer an offshore experiment. It is now integral to the global operating architecture of some of the world's largest enterprises.

The nature of that growth is changing too: nearly half of the GCCs established since FY2021 were built with AI as a core focus from inception — another indication that the capability model is changing faster than traditional workforce architectures.

But there is a second transition underway — a quieter one, and a harder one.

The question is no longer whether India can provide talent at scale. The question is whether GCCs can continuously convert that talent into strategic enterprise capability.

The GCC Has Changed. Has the Operating Model?

The industry itself recognises the shift. The 2026 NASSCOM–Zinnov report describes India's GCC evolution as moving from "Delivery Engine" to "Enterprise Nerve Centre."

PwC's latest research reaches a similar conclusion from a different angle: GCCs are increasingly responsible for product engineering, advanced analytics, cybersecurity, AI research and enterprise transformation — and the central challenge is no longer access to talent alone, but the ability to build and scale the right capabilities fast enough.

Yet here is the uncomfortable part: our workforce architectures often still look remarkably similar to those built for the earlier delivery model.

We still talk extensively about sanctioned headcount, open positions, hiring velocity, attrition, utilisation, cost per FTE, spans and layers. All important. Increasingly insufficient.

Because AI changes the economics of work itself.

The Unit of Workforce Planning Is Changing

Consider a simplified example. A process that historically required 100 people may, after automation and AI, require substantially fewer. That does not necessarily mean the organisation needs fewer capabilities — it may need a different mix: fewer transactional roles, more process architects, stronger domain specialists, more data and AI capability, product and engineering talent, AI governance, change leadership, and people who can work effectively alongside intelligent systems.

The workforce question therefore changes from:

"How many people do we need?"

to:

"What work needs to be done, what capabilities does that work require, and what combination of human expertise, technology and AI should perform it?"

That is not a recruitment question. It is a workforce architecture question.

The Talent Paradox

This is where the current data becomes genuinely interesting.

India has extraordinary depth of technical talent. Yet PwC's 2026 research, based on 200 senior GCC executives across eight industries, finds that average AI literacy among senior GCC leaders is only 27%. More than 90% of GCCs say their leadership teams are not yet sufficiently AI-literate for strategic decision-making. And the gaps are not confined to technical skills:

• 58% — gaps in AI-driven workforce change management

• 54% — gaps in human–AI teaming

• 45% — gaps in enterprise-wide AI strategy

(PwC India–FICCI, "Navigating the Skills Imperative for India's GCCs in the AI Era," 2026)

That creates a paradox. We are building increasingly sophisticated technology capability while the leadership architecture required to govern and scale that capability is still catching up.

So I would not say the GCC has entered the capability era completely. I would say:

The GCC has entered the capability era strategically — but most organisations have not yet redesigned themselves to operate in it.

That distinction matters. It changes the agenda from celebration to execution.

What I Learned From Building GCCs

Across the centres I have helped establish and scale, one lesson has remained consistent: the difficult part is rarely the first 100 hires. The difficult part is what happens after scale arrives — when you start confronting questions like:

• What capabilities should remain local versus global?

• Which roles should evolve as the business matures?

• How do we build leadership depth rather than managerial layers?

• How do we prevent critical knowledge from concentrating in a few individuals?

• How do we retain high-value capability when the market is competing for the same talent?

• How do we move people from transactional work into higher-value work?

• How do we redesign the organisation when technology changes faster than the job architecture?

These are not problems another recruitment campaign can solve. They require architecture.

From Job Architecture to Capability Architecture

Traditional workforce architecture tends to begin with:

Job → role → skills → person

The emerging model needs to begin with:

Business outcome → work → capability → human/AI configuration → accountability → value

That sounds like a semantic change. It isn't?

It changes what HR, business leaders and Boards need to manage. A job architecture tells you what roles exist. A capability architecture tells you what the organisation must be able to do exceptionally well — and that distinction becomes critical the moment technology can alter the amount, sequence and nature of work itself.

Five Decisions, Not Another Framework

1. Design around future business outcomes.Start with the enterprise strategy. What must the business become exceptionally good at over the next three to five years? Identify the capabilities required to deliver it. Only then determine roles and headcount.Strategy → capability → work → roles → workforce — not the reverse.

2. Map capability gaps, not just vacancies.A vacancy tells you where a person is missing. A capability gap tells you where the business may be unable to execute its strategy. For every critical capability, leaders should know: current maturity → future requirement → gap → build/buy/borrow/automate → time to proficiency → business value.

3. Build for talent mobility.Stop treating people as permanently attached to yesterday's jobs. If automation changes transactional work, can those employees move into analytics, process redesign, product, AI-enabled operations or strategic enterprise roles? That requires skills intelligence, internal mobility, modular learning — and managers measured partly on developing capability, not just delivering today's workload. The objective is not reskilling for its own sake. It is redeployment at enterprise scale.

4. Make leadership AI-ready.This may be the most overlooked issue on the list. Gartner's 2026 CHRO research — based on 426 CHROs across 23 industries and four regions — identifies shaping work in the human-machine era as one of four major CHRO priorities this year, alongside AI transformation, leadership mobilisation and culture. Leadership development cannot stop at "how do leaders use GenAI?" The harder questions are: how do leaders redesign work, manage human–AI teams, decide what stays human, own accountability for AI-enabled decisions, and preserve institutional knowledge as automation removes parts of the workflow? Leadership capability is becoming part of the AI infrastructure. PwC's numbers tell us we have work to do.

5. Change what the Board measures.I would challenge any GCC leadership team whose primary dashboard still revolves around headcount, hiring, attrition, cost and utilisation. Those metrics tell you about workforce activity. They do not tell you about enterprise capability.

The point isn't to discard the traditional metrics. It's to put them in their proper place.

The Board Question I Would Ask

This is where the GCC conversation becomes a governance issue rather than an HR issue. If I were sitting on the Board, I would want management to answer ten questions:

1. Which capabilities does our GCC uniquely own for the enterprise?

2. Which of those capabilities directly create competitive advantage?

3. Which capabilities will become commoditised or automated over the next three years?

4. Where are our most material capability concentrations and succession risks?

5. How quickly can we redeploy talent when the business model changes?

6. How AI-literate is our GCC leadership team?

7. How prepared are our leaders to manage human–AI teams?

8. Are our reward and career architectures reinforcing the capabilities we say we need?

9. Are we measuring productivity improvements, or actual enterprise value creation?

10. If GCC headcount stopped growing tomorrow, could the centre still materially increase its contribution to the enterprise?

That final question is the one I would put in bold in a Board paper. It separates scale from strategic value.

The Real Competitive Advantage May Be Capability Velocity

I don't believe the future belongs to the GCC with the most employees. Nor do I believe headcount growth is becoming irrelevant. The better question is:

How quickly can a GCC convert changing business requirements into deployable organisational capability?

Call it capability velocity.

Imagine two centres. One has 15,000 employees but takes 18 months to build a new strategic capability. Another has 7,000 employees and can assemble, develop and deploy the required capability in six months.

Which one is more strategically valuable?

Scale matters. But the ability to convert scale into strategic capability matters more.

And This Is Where AI Changes the Equation

AI isn't simply another technology layer sitting on top of the GCC. It can alter the volume of work, the sequence of work, the skills required, the number of people required, the nature of managerial work, the speed of learning, the economics of delivery — and eventually the organisational structure itself.

So the real question isn't "how much AI can our GCC implement?"

It is: "How should our GCC be redesigned because AI exists?"

That is a much bigger leadership question.

My Conclusion

I have watched the GCC model evolve from shared services and offshore delivery into increasingly sophisticated global capability platforms.

The first era rewarded scale. The second rewarded operational excellence. The emerging era will reward capability creation, innovation, enterprise ownership, and the ability to combine human expertise with technology intelligently.

India has already demonstrated that it can supply the scale. The next challenge is to demonstrate that it can continuously create capability at speed.

That means GCC leaders, CHROs, CIOs, CEOs and Boards need to stop treating workforce strategy as a question of how many people the organisation has. The more consequential question is:

What is this organisation capable of doing that it could not do before — and how quickly can we build the next capability?

That is the conversation I believe belongs in the Boardroom.

The future of GCCs will not be determined by cost advantage alone. It will be determined by capability advantage — and by how quickly organisations can build it.

— Sharmilaa Thakur