AI fluency, domain depth and ownership: Biju Davis on the three traits of future-ready GCCs

Global capability centres are no longer measured solely by scale, talent volume or cost efficiency. As enterprises hand them greater product, engineering and business ownership, the challenge is sustaining the agility, curiosity and accountability that often define high-performing product organisations.

In an interview with People Matters, Biju Davis, Senior Vice President & India Site Leader at InvoiceCloud, discussed the leadership, culture and operating principles that can help GCCs preserve innovation as they grow. His perspective centres on a simple premise: future-ready GCCs will be distinguished not only by technical capability, but by their ability to combine AI fluency, domain depth and ownership.

Why scale does not have to dilute agility

Many organisations assume growth inevitably slows decision-making and weakens entrepreneurial thinking. Davis sees the problem differently.

"Scale is not the enemy of agility. Hierarchy is."

According to Davis, organisations often lose entrepreneurial energy when decision-making moves upwards faster than accountability moves downwards. He said leaders need to be deliberate about protecting teams' ability to identify customer problems, experiment with solutions and deliver outcomes without navigating excessive approval layers.

At InvoiceCloud, he said engineers and product managers are given customer problems rather than specifications. Teams own solutions from architecture through production, creating accountability that formal governance mechanisms cannot easily replicate.

"When people feel genuinely responsible for outcomes, they move faster and think more creatively. The job of leadership is to protect that feeling as the organisation grows."

Spotting bureaucratic drift before it slows innovation

The earliest warning signs of bureaucracy do not necessarily appear in metrics or dashboards.

Davis said they often emerge through everyday conversations.

He highlighted several indicators leaders should watch closely:

• Employees stop raising problems or ideas because suggestions move slowly.
• Decision cycles that previously took days begin taking weeks.
• Teams spend increasing amounts of time justifying work through presentations.
• Direct conversations are replaced by prolonged alignment exercises.

"The earliest sign is usually invisible on a dashboard, it shows up in conversations."

To identify potential bottlenecks, Davis recommends regularly asking employees closest to the work how long key decisions take compared with six months earlier. A growing gap can signal that organisational processes are becoming rigid.

His preferred remedy is not immediate restructuring.

"The fix is rarely structural at first. It is usually about giving explicit permission. Permission to move, to experiment, to be wrong without a post-mortem."

Rethinking governance as an enabler rather than a constraint

As GCCs assume greater responsibility in regulated industries, leaders often face a familiar tension between speed and compliance.

Davis rejects the idea that governance and innovation must compete with one another.

"The mistake most organisations make is treating governance and speed as opposing forces that need to be traded off. They are not."

He believes effective governance creates clarity by defining what teams can do independently, what requires review and what falls outside acceptable boundaries.

When governance establishes clear decision boundaries and accountability mechanisms, teams can move faster without creating unnecessary operational or compliance risk.

Problems arise when organisations design processes around exceptional cases and then apply them universally.

"When every decision, significant or not, has to travel through the same approval process, the organisation slows to the pace of its most cautious function."

Davis said governance should be embedded into systems and product architecture from the outset rather than introduced as a final checkpoint.

The leadership shift from decision-maker to enabler

As GCCs expand, leadership expectations change.

Davis said leadership models suitable for a 50-person operation rarely remain effective at 250 or 500 employees. The challenge is recognising when existing structures no longer support organisational needs.

"What I have observed is that as GCCs scale, the most important shift is from leaders who make decisions to leaders who create the conditions for good decisions to be made by the people closest to the work."

This transition requires leaders to become comfortable stepping back from operational decision-making while strengthening accountability across teams.

"Accountability follows naturally when ownership is real."

He cautioned that ownership cannot exist if decisions can be overturned by leaders who were not involved in the process.

"If a team knows that a decision can be reversed by a senior leader who was not in the room, ownership is an illusion."

Culture remains the foundation

Beyond structure and governance, Davis views organisational culture as the factor that ultimately determines whether innovation can be sustained.

"Culture is the operating system. Everything else, structure, process, tools, runs on top of it."

He warned that organisations begin undermining innovation when they reward caution over curiosity, visibility over impact, or hierarchy over expertise.

According to Davis, three cultural characteristics matter most:

• Psychological safety
• Genuine curiosity
• A shared belief that the work matters

"When engineers feel safe to propose something that might not work, when they are genuinely curious about the customer problem rather than just the technical solution, and when they believe that what they build reaches real people and makes a real difference, innovation happens almost as a byproduct."

He also stressed that culture does not automatically scale with organisational growth. Leaders must actively model desired behaviours rather than relying on values statements or onboarding materials.

The three capabilities that will define future-ready GCCs

Looking ahead, Davis identified three qualities that will separate innovation-led GCCs from those focused primarily on execution.

1. Domain depth

Davis believes technical excellence alone is becoming increasingly commoditised.

"The GCCs that create distinctive value are the ones whose engineers understand why a payment platform needs to behave differently at month-end billing cycles, or why an insurance claim disbursement has different reliability requirements than a retail transaction."

2. AI fluency

For Davis, AI capability extends beyond adopting new tools.

"AI fluency, not as a tool adoption initiative, but as a fundamental shift in how problems are approached and how products are built."

He said organisations that treat AI merely as a productivity enhancer may achieve incremental gains, while those that redesign engineering culture and product architecture around AI can unlock more transformative outcomes.

3. Ownership

The third capability is what Davis describes as the courage to own outcomes.

"Innovation hubs own outcomes. Execution centres own outputs."

He said the distinction is critical because outcome ownership means taking responsibility for customer success rather than task completion.

"Owning an outcome means being accountable for whether the product works for the customer, not just whether the ticket was closed."

Keeping entrepreneurial thinking alive

For leaders navigating growth, Davis offered a straightforward principle.

"Scale slowly on process and quickly on trust."

He cautioned against introducing additional processes as the default response to every challenge, while delaying the development of trust and autonomy.

Davis also called for organisations to explicitly protect experimentation by allocating resources and creating safe environments for initiatives that may not succeed.

"If the only projects that get resourced are the ones with guaranteed outcomes, you have already lost the entrepreneurial culture."

Finally, he encouraged leaders to maintain direct connections between teams and customers.

As organisations grow, customer understanding can become filtered through multiple layers of process and stakeholder management. Davis believes organisations sustain innovation longer when teams remain close to the problems they are trying to solve through research, support interactions and field engagement.

For GCC leaders, the message is clear: future relevance will depend less on organisational size and more on whether teams can combine deep industry knowledge, AI-native thinking and genuine ownership while preserving the curiosity and speed that drive innovation.