HR leaders who are waiting to be invited into the business conversation may already be late.
For years, many of us in HR spoke about wanting a seat at the table. That debate, in my view, is behind us. The harder question is the one that follows: now that we have the seat, are we prepared to own part of the agenda it holds?
I do not ask this rhetorically. I serve as Amtech’s Global Chief People and Culture Officer, and I also lead our India centre as Managing Director. On most days, that means I start my morning inside an enterprise people question and end my evening inside a site business question.
That combination has reinforced something I increasingly believe: HR is not separate from the business. We see strategy, leadership, culture, capability, performance, organisation design and employee sentiment together. That vantage point becomes especially important when companies are scaling, operating models are changing, and technologies such as AI are reshaping work.
The gap between ambition and organisational readiness is already visible. McKinsey found that 92% of companies planned to increase AI investment over the next three years, yet only 1% of leaders considered their organisations mature in AI deployment.
Technology may be moving quickly. But transformation ultimately depends on whether the organisation can keep pace.
What changes when HR has to make the business call?
When Amtech decided to build its India centre from the ground up, we recognised something simple: in its first years, a new centre is not primarily a technology problem or a real-estate problem. It is also a people and business design problem.
Who you hire first, what standards you establish, which capabilities you anchor and how leaders are chosen determine what that centre can become.
Early hiring made that very real for me. From a site leadership lens, the temptation in any growth environment is to move quickly and fill roles. Speed matters. But from a people and culture lens, I knew the first leadership hires would set the standard long before any formal culture programme could.
So we made a deliberate choice: build fast, but not at the cost of the leadership bar. It forced us to ask better questions. Are we hiring only for technical capability, or for ownership? Are we bringing in people who can collaborate globally, or only manage locally? Are we designing roles around today’s work, or around the capability we want India to build over the next few years?
Wearing both hats means I cannot separate a people decision from its business consequence.
How GCCs can go beyond a support centre
EY’s 2025 GCC Pulse Survey found that 92% of GCC leaders said their centres now contribute beyond cost arbitrage, while 87% reported ownership of end-to-end global processes.
India no longer needs to prove that it can execute. Increasingly, a centre has to prove that it deserves ownership. At Amtech, we made that question explicit from day one. India has end-to-end accountability for rebuilding one of our core products, including technical direction, architecture decisions and engineering outcomes. Quality Engineering is also being built as a global capability led from India.
Local leadership therefore needs real decision rights. Decisions around organisation structure, role design, hiring priorities and budgets cannot all sit somewhere else if the centre itself is accountable for outcomes.
We also designed the global operating model before hiring at scale. Reporting lines, shared goals, global councils and decision forums could not be afterthoughts. If India was expected to own outcomes, it had to be present in the conversations where those outcomes were defined. Increasingly, leaders need to ask, “What business problem are we responsible for solving?”
Scaling globally vs. local context
My dual role has also changed how I think about people practices. A global organisation needs consistency around performance, leadership expectations, career growth and culture. But consistency should not become bureaucracy. The real skill is building practices that are global in principle and local in usefulness.
Performance is a good example. People cannot genuinely own outcomes if they do not understand the customer, product roadmap and global priorities behind their work. Goal-setting therefore has to come with context, manager conversations and operating rhythms that help people understand why their work matters.
That also puts a much greater burden on managers. Managers are where strategy becomes experience. They translate priorities, create clarity and influence whether people feel trusted, stretched and supported. As organisations grow more distributed, investing in manager capability is therefore not simply an HR intervention. It is part of how the business executes.
AI adoption or people transformation?
At Amtech, every employee is expected to think about AI as part of their goals. I am often asked how we are managing the rollout. My answer is that we are not managing a rollout. We are managing a culture shift.
AI usage is easy to claim. AI judgement is harder to build. Prompting is not fluency. Real fluency is knowing where AI can improve the work, where human judgement must remain central and how to use both responsibly.
And the capability challenge is significant. The World Economic Forum estimates that 39% of workers’ existing skill sets will be transformed or become outdated by 2030, while 63% of employers identify skills gaps as a major barrier to business transformation.
We can already see organisations responding. Among the India GCCs surveyed by EY, 71% reported reskilling initiatives in 2025, reflecting the growing importance of future-ready capability alongside technology investment.
This is where HR must lead, not assist. AI will redraw roles, learning, performance expectations, career paths and skills, the exact territory HR understands deeply. It will also change how employees think about their own relevance. Some will be excited. Some will be anxious. Most will probably experience both.
Slogans will not address that. Learning will. So will clear guardrails, honest communication and practical use cases that show people how AI improves their own work.
What’s next for HR?
Many HR leaders already understand some of the hardest parts of business transformation. We understand incentives, leadership behaviour, culture, capability gaps and change fatigue. We know why strategies fail during execution, where communication breaks down and when organisations move too quickly without alignment.
These are not soft insights. They are business insights. But HR also has to earn the right to use them. We need to understand how the company makes money, what customers value, where execution breaks down, what the financial and operational trade-offs are and which capabilities will matter next. We have to become comfortable with ambiguity because growth rarely comes with a perfect playbook.
And we cannot see AI, technology or business transformation as somebody else’s agenda.
The next generation of GCCs will not be judged only by headcount, cost advantage or functional coverage. They will increasingly be judged by the ownership they create, the leaders they build, the complexity they manage and the value they deliver. That is what we are building at Amtech India. It is also a promise to the people who join us: this is a centre where you do not simply execute a strategy written elsewhere; you help write it.
The question is no longer whether HR deserves a seat at the table.
It is whether we are prepared to take responsibility for what happens there.
About the author:
Vinod Kumar is the Global Chief People and Culture Officer and Managing Director, India at Amtech Software.