Can you replace a department of 1,000 engineers with a department of 100? At the time of the NASA moon landing, that might not have been possible. But today, with technology and skills at their current point of evolution, it can be done - and it should be done, said People Matters CEO Pushkar Bidwai in his opening keynote at People Matters GCC Talent Summit 2025 in Bengaluru.

"If we are thinking in terms of the number of people, I think we are getting it wrong. It's all about business impact and innovation. How are we able to drive that? And if that is our sole focus, how can we make the 10x shift part of our talent strategies?"

A $50,000 space launch vs a $2,500 space launch

Comparing the operating cost of NASA's Space Launch System with the operating cost of SpaceX's Falcon, Pushkar pointed out that a famous and long-established organisation like NASA might have all the resources, all the funding, and all the employer branding, but there will always be another innovator coming out of the woodwork to challenge the way things are done.

"Having an obsession about 10x improvement on our talent strategy is what will lead to top innovations," he said.

Formula One teams follow a similar model, he added: they hire a small and select number of engineers who can deliver the best technology at a very high speed, focusing on agility.

"They didn't just hire people. They hired problem solvers. They were able to create a talent base that was 10x faster, 10x better, 10x more innovative. As GCCs are growing, are we trying to solve the 10x part, or are we still thinking incrementally?"

Talent density will surpass talent size

The idea of having a small, elite team rather than a huge, diffuse workforce is one that GCCs need to shift towards, Pushkar said. He pointed to how 700 engineers at OpenAI, for example, beat out industry giants like Google and Microsoft to bring generative AI to the market - and then DeepSeek beat out OpenAI with 200 engineers.

And as to the cost of such a team comprising top talent, which is likely to be far more expensive to find, hire, and retain versus a larger team of mid-level talent?

"I think we have long gone away from the era of thinking of things in terms of cost," Pushkar said. "I feel the future belongs to organisations who are going to take the SpaceX approach, and not the NASA approach. The north star should be creating impact through innovation, not through delivering tasks."

How AI is coming into play amid all this

When we have large numbers of people to upskill and bring on board with a new organisational direction, AI takes a significant role in fast-tracking learning and skilling, Pushkar said, pointing to the example of Wal-Mart's Element AI. Personalised learning, real-time feedback, and the ability to integrate AR and VR into the training for greater realism all play into it.

"The learning time reduction was 37%," he said. "Now multiply that into the number of people and look at the productivity that could drive. We're talking about knowledge retention at a scale that wasn't possible in traditional mediums."

Essentially, he pointed out, organisations can today create 10x teams by hiring some of the best problem solvers available, and also skilling a very large number of people at a highly personalised level.

Furthermore, a lot of technology leapfrogging will happen in the India context, he predicted. AI use will jump from simple analysing data and searching for information, to creating documents, to agentic AI, and then to an autonomous stage that will truly revolutionise talent acquisition.

"Imagine a chatbot that does the job description for you, does the sourcing and assessment, captures the video, matches responses with the culture framework of the organisation, does background verification, creates a customised onboarding program, walks new hires through the onboarding program. At the end of the first week, it sends a feedback link, gathers that feedback, sends it to the managers at all level. It gives a view to the CEO. All of that done by a single agent."

That, Pushkar said, is where GCCs can challenge the traditional idea of hiring by volume.

"Talent leaders need to be at the centre of driving this in the GCC space. So if that is the power that we have, why can't we create an impact?"