Barclays India Workforce Mix Evolves with AI Integration, Contrary to Previous Concerns

Barclays Global Services Continues to Witness Steady Growth Amid AI-Focused Hiring

Barclays Global Services, the global capability centre (GCC) arm of UK's Barclays Bank, has been operating in India for 19 years, setting up offices across five locations including Mumbai, Pune, Bengaluru, Chennai, and Delhi NCR with over 32,000 employees, accounting for a third of its global workforce.

In February, the company opened another office in Gurugram, signaling the strategic importance of India as a GCC hub, where it plans to hire over 4,000 employees. This move reflects the company's commitment to expanding its operations in the country.

According to CEO Praveen Kumar, the job roles in the GCC are shifting towards operations, analytics, and faster customer services, with employees being restructured into smaller 'scrum' teams. Additionally, more decision-making and global leadership roles are being created in India. This shift in job roles is not a result of a shrinking workforce but rather a change in the way employees are utilized.

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India Teams Drive AI Solutions and Technology Offerings

The India teams are responsible for developing many of the company's AI solutions and technology offerings that get deployed around the world. While AI is being integrated into engineering and business solutions, humans are still in the loop, according to Kumar. AI is being used to improve personal productivity, credit underwriting, call summarization, and sending letters to customers. However, humans are still needed to monitor for errors.

GCCs Still Need IT Companies

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Despite the notion that GCCs building in-house technology teams is eating away IT services or system integrators' (SI) demand, Kumar clarified that they are in fact much more needed now, especially in the current times of building AI use cases. Most large GCCs are dependent on IT company resources to some extent. At Barclays, Kumar and his team work closely with several third-party SI resources, with around 30-40% of the company's technology workforce in India being consultants sourced from SI partners.

As productivity goes up, Kumar expects some dependency to reduce. However, the company will continue to need SIs for specialist skills or flex resourcing, particularly in areas such as investment programs that require quick resource ramp-up or solutions based on their experience of working with peers.