India’s Global Capability Centre (GCC) story has largely been told through three numbers: the number of centres, the number of professionals employed and the revenue generated. Those numbers explain the scale of the opportunity. They do not necessarily explain its strategic value.
A centre employing 5,000 people could still be executing decisions made elsewhere. A much smaller operation could be shaping global products, influencing technology roadmaps and taking responsibility for business-critical outcomes.
As multinational companies rethink how they organise technology, operations and enterprise capabilities across geographies, a more important question is emerging: who actually owns the work being performed in India?
Three companies, three operating models
Consider Citizens Financial Group. The US banking group established its Hyderabad GCC in partnership with Cognizant in 2025. Within its first year, the centre reached 1,000 hires. Its responsibilities include cloud modernisation, AI platforms, cybersecurity and digital product engineering. Citizens has described the GCC as part of its global engineering engine, with teams in India working alongside US colleagues on technology priorities and AI-driven solutions.
The important distinction is that this is not simply an external team delivering technology projects. Citizens has said the centre is central to strengthening internal expertise and reducing reliance on third-party providers. The partnership model helped accelerate the centre’s establishment while giving the bank a base from which to build deeper institutional capability in India. (Cognizant’s launch announcement; Financial Express on the 1,000-hire milestone.)
Now consider Truist. The US financial services company is taking a different route. In October 2026, Infosys announced an expanded collaboration to support Truist’s AI-first Hyderabad GCC. The initiative involves consolidating capabilities previously delivered through multiple supplier relationships in India into a more integrated operating model.
More than 1,000 colleagues have been onboarded as part of the centre’s growth. Infosys is supporting the development of a self-sustaining centre of excellence that brings together AI, technology, data and operations. Truist says the model is designed to reduce third-party dependency, manage global delivery complexity and build enduring expertise. (Infosys announcement, 19 October 2026.)
The starting point here is not necessarily a completely new organisation. It is the consolidation and reorganisation of work that already exists across multiple delivery relationships.
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The third example is Blackstone. The global alternative asset manager opened its second Indian office in Bengaluru in October 2026, establishing a GCC that brings together employees and professional-services partnerships across corporate functions. The centre spans finance, technology, human resources, legal and compliance. It began with approximately 80 employees, with plans to grow to 100 or more by year-end.
The Bengaluru operation is overseen by Susan Yung, a senior managing director in Blackstone Credit & Insurance’s Investment Operations team. Blackstone says the office will strengthen its operational capabilities in India and globally. (Blackstone’s announcement, 27 October 2026.)
These three examples are not interchangeable. Citizens is building strategic technology capabilities through a partner-supported arrangement. Truist is consolidating supplier-distributed capabilities into a more integrated operating model. Blackstone is establishing a new corporate and professional-services capability base in Bengaluru.
But they point towards the same underlying development: the operating model of a GCC is becoming as important as its location.
The ownership gap
India has spent decades establishing itself as a destination for global technology, finance, engineering and business operations. The first generation of global centres was largely associated with cost efficiency, process execution and access to skilled professionals.
Over time, many centres moved into more sophisticated responsibilities: analytics, enterprise technology, research, product engineering, cybersecurity and digital transformation. Artificial intelligence is accelerating that evolution.
Yet there is a distinction between performing sophisticated work and owning it. A GCC may develop software without controlling the product roadmap. It may build AI models without deciding how those models are deployed across the enterprise. It may manage financial operations without influencing the underlying business decisions.
That is the ownership gap. To understand whether a GCC is becoming strategically important, six dimensions deserve attention:
- Decision rights: Can India-based leaders make consequential decisions, or must major choices be approved elsewhere?
- Roadmap control: Does the India team influence what gets built, prioritised and delivered?
- Budget influence: Does the centre have a meaningful role in allocating technology and business investment?
- Intellectual property: Is the centre creating proprietary technology, platforms, processes or patents?
- Product responsibility: Does it own important parts of a global product or technology platform?
- Global accountability: Is the India organisation responsible for measurable business outcomes across markets?
These dimensions provide a more meaningful way to evaluate the maturity of a GCC than employee count alone. They also explain why two centres of similar size can have very different strategic importance. This builds on our earlier analysis of India’s nearly $100 billion GCC industry and the shift towards what these centres control.
AI could accelerate the shift — but it will not guarantee ownership
Artificial intelligence is changing the economics of global capability operations. As AI automates repetitive tasks and improves productivity, companies may no longer need to expand their centres at the same rate as before. Smaller teams with deeper expertise could take on work that previously required much larger delivery organisations.
But AI adoption itself does not automatically create strategic ownership. A centre can deploy AI tools and still have limited influence over enterprise architecture, product strategy or investment decisions.
The real transition happens when teams in India participate in defining the problem, designing the solution, deciding how technology is deployed and taking responsibility for its results. That requires more than AI training. It requires experienced leadership, domain knowledge, access to enterprise data, governance authority and a meaningful position within the parent company’s decision-making structure.
The emerging opportunity is therefore not simply to build AI-enabled GCCs. It is to build GCCs that can own AI-enabled business capabilities. This connects with the broader shift explored in our analysis of Woodside’s Bengaluru GCC and the question of what India can own, and our coverage of the changing build-operate-transfer model for capability centres.
The next GCC competition will be about control
For India, the next phase of GCC growth will depend on whether the country can attract mandates that involve global decision-making, product responsibility, research, intellectual property and business accountability.
For companies, the challenge will be designing operating models that combine global integration with local authority. For GCC leaders, the role itself is evolving. The traditional centre head responsible for delivery, hiring and cost management may increasingly give way to leaders accountable for global technology, product and business outcomes.
This also changes how GCC success should be measured. Employee numbers, office space and annual hiring remain relevant indicators of scale. They are not sufficient measures of strategic value. A more useful evaluation would examine the complexity of work performed, the decisions made locally, the products influenced, the intellectual property created and the global outcomes for which the centre is accountable.
India does not need every GCC to become a global headquarters. Nor will every centre follow the same path. Some will remain specialised operational hubs, while others will become global product, technology or business platforms. The objective should not be to force every centre into one model. It should be to understand the responsibility each centre has earned and the capabilities it is developing.
The question India must start asking
The next chapter of India’s GCC story should move beyond counting how many centres are being established and how many professionals they employ. It should examine what those centres are actually responsible for.
Citizens Financial, Truist and Blackstone demonstrate that companies are experimenting with different structures to build and consolidate capabilities in India. The long-term test for each model will be how much institutional knowledge, authority and accountability becomes embedded in the India organisation.
For policymakers, the priority should be creating conditions that encourage high-value mandates, not just employment commitments. For companies, it should be building leadership and operating structures that allow India teams to contribute to global decisions. For the industry, it should be recognising that capability is not the same as ownership.
India’s next GCC milestone will not be measured only by the number of people working here. It will be measured by how much of the global enterprise is trusted to make decisions, build products, create intellectual property and deliver business outcomes from India.
That is the real ownership question. And it may be the most important question facing India’s GCC industry over the next decade.
Featured image: The Yardcoworking / Unsplash.
Editorial note: The operating models described here are not identical. The article distinguishes a partner-supported GCC, supplier consolidation and a directly established corporate capability centre rather than treating them as one universal model.
