GCCs are actively hiring, and IT companies are searching their talent pool.

According to a Nasscom report from last month, the market size of India’s GCCs is expected to increase from its current $46 billion to $60 billion by 2025, with the total number of GCCs exceeding 1,900.

Global competence centres (GCCs) are on a significant hiring binge at a time when Indian IT services firms are primarily trying to utilise their bench strength without needing to hire fresh personnel. The rise in GCC hiring indicates that they are increasingly taking on work in India, which was formerly the exclusive purview of Indian IT services companies.

Large international firms are now hiring the same vast army of IT engineers that TCS, Infosys, and Wipro boasted of in front of their clients to sign massive contracts to complete their work in-house. Today, international businesses are developing their digital transformation capabilities rather than only looking to India for cost and talent arbitrage.

According to a Nasscom report from last month, the market size of India’s GCCs is expected to increase from its current $46 billion to $60 billion by 2025, with the total number of GCCs exceeding 1,900. According to Nasscom, the GCCs employ roughly 1.66 million people, compared to the 5.4 million individuals employed by the IT sector overall.

According to an even more upbeat EY report, the GCC industry will likely hire almost 2.6 million people in India by the end of 2030, bringing the total number of GCC residents to more than 4.5 million.

While the demand for IT services has drastically decreased, hiring by GCCs in India has significantly improved, according to Sunil C, CEO of TeamLease Digital.

What are these employees, who are migrating in large numbers to GCCs, supposed to accomplish? Every company’s differentiator now centres on digital transformation, according to Ramkumar Ramamoorthy, partner at Catalincs, a development consultancy firm. As a result, companies are increasingly looking to develop and own these skills.

Global businesses are developing own digital transformation capabilities rather than renting or borrowing them from outside suppliers since digital talents are widely available in India. Ramamoorthy stated, “This is the reason I think a lot of GCCs are putting up facilities in India.

He continued, “In the last ten years, STEM (science, technology, engineering, and mathematics) talent has also exploded in India. Numerous IITs, NITs, and IIITs have been founded over time. 21 of the 25 IIITs were founded within the last ten years. India already boasts more than 400 private universities thanks to how well the idea has taken off there. In India, there has been a rapid burst of talent of the highest calibre.

New technologies have made it much simpler for businesses to inshore their operations in addition to the availability of personnel. “Today’s customers are sitting with a large repository of data,” added another industry expert. Customers are now in a far better position to handle work more cheaply than the outsourced contractors thanks to advances in AI.

The founder of Pareekh Consulting, Pareekh Jain, stated, “Technology developments are occurring very quickly. Clients that signed contracts five years ago would believe they are locked in to earlier technologies with the advent of much more sophisticated technology like metaverse or generative AI.

Another justification for clients choosing in-house operations is the freedom it affords them to implement changes more quickly than using outside vendors. “More GCCs are moving to India because they now want some part of their technological work, like data, analytics, and AI in-house and under their control,” adds Vijay Sivaram, CEO of Quess IT Staffing.

“Not just large conglomerates, but today a lot of startups and unicorns like Twitter, Airbnb, and Uber are setting up their centres in India,” said Vikram Ahuja, MD, ANSR. ANSR assists international businesses in establishing centres in India for talent, office space, market intelligence, etc.

“These companies are not just establishing back offices in low-cost locations,” Ahuja continued. Instead, they are developing high-scale capacity in other critical areas and technologies like AI. In India, centres of excellence are being built for the entire world.

The same individuals who spent years working for IT services companies are now creating GCCs that are bigger and better. “Our own capability centre in India in early 2021 was less than 800 and now it has grown to more than 1,700 in less than two years,” said Mohua Sengupta, MD of Mashreq Global Network, who relocated from an Indian IT service business in 2021.

When questioned if GCCs could handle the difficulty of managing a large number of employees, she responded, “The same personnel migrate in and out of both GCCs and IT services. Why can’t the same leaders manage in GCCs if they used to run huge IT service companies?