By: Roopa Bharvani
India’s GCC ecosystem is maturing rapidly, and with that maturity comes a fundamental shift in expectations. What were once delivery-focused operations have evolved into global offices, carrying strategic mandates, enterprise-level responsibilities, and measurable accountability for business outcomes.
That progression has direct implications for how these organisations are built, and for HR leaders, it has meant rethinking the function almost entirely.
The clearest signal of that rethinking is what I would call a Talent Transition. Organisations are moving away from volume-based hiring models toward deeper capability investment, with a sharper focus on revenue and bottom-line impact. Skills have become the more reliable unit of measure, because role definitions, however carefully written, are increasingly limited in what they can capture about a person’s actual potential. The ability to learn continuously, work across disciplines, and adapt to changing technology is what distinguishes talent that compounds over time. Learning agility has moved from a desirable trait to a baseline expectation. And increasingly, so has curiosity: the willingness to engage with new tools, new ways of working, and AI-driven change as a matter of course rather than exception.
Upskilling and reskilling have consequently become core business priorities. For organisations serious about their next phase of growth, they are not a parallel track to the business. They are part of it.
When AI meets the workforce
Organisations that approach AI primarily as a technology investment often find the returns harder to realise than expected. The infrastructure matters, the tools matter, but outcomes are ultimately shaped by how well the workforce understands and moves with the change.
The people challenge here is specific. When workflows shift and roles begin to look different, uncertainty sets in quickly. People are not simply learning a new system. They are recalibrating their sense of where they fit and what their contribution looks like going forward. In that environment, internal resilience and the ability to work with ambiguity become as important as any technical skill. Organisations that build for this directly, through honest communication, accessible learning pathways, and visible leadership commitment, tend to see AI adoption take hold in ways that actually move the business. Those that treat it as a rollout rather than a transition rarely get the returns they anticipated.
This is also why workforce planning can no longer sit downstream of business and technology strategy. As GCCs take on more of the global innovation mandate, talent decisions and transformation decisions need to be the same conversation.
Building future-ready organisations
In my experience, organisations that sustain performance through change tend to share certain qualities. Learning is embedded in how work gets done, not housed in a separate programme. Internal mobility is real and actively supported, giving people genuine paths across functions rather than just upward progression. And that internal mobility, when it works well, creates a natural bridge into leadership development, because people who have moved across the organisation bring a breadth of perspective that functional specialists often take years to develop.
Leadership readiness has consequently become one of the more pressing priorities across GCCs. As India-based centres operating as global offices take on greater accountability for global strategy, leaders need to be equipped for enterprise-wide decision-making and transformation at scale.
India’s GCC ecosystem, with over 2,100 centres and approaching USD 100 billion (as per the latest Zinnov-Nasscom survey) in revenue, has reached a genuine inflection point. The next phase of growth will be defined less by scale and more by the depth of talent and quality of leadership these centres are able to build and sustain.
Technology will keep advancing. Keeping pace with it, learning new tools, embracing AI as part of everyday work, will increasingly be table stakes. The organisations that hold up through the next wave will be the ones that treated talent readiness with the same seriousness as technological readiness and built the kind of leadership that could carry that commitment forward in practice.
About the author: Roopa Bharvani serves as Vice President – Human Resources, Global Services at Fiserv. She brings over two decades of experience in human resources, with deep expertise in the financial services and Global Capability Centre (GCC) sectors.