IT Firms Dominate India's GCC Tech Workforce with 30% Share

Global Capability Centres in India Continue to Rely on IT Services Firms

India's global capability centres (GCCs) are expanding their in-house technology capabilities, but their dependence on IT services firms remains significant. According to industry experts, rather than replacing outsourcing providers, GCCs are increasingly forming partnerships with them.

Data from staffing firm TeamLease Digital and GCC consulting firm Inductus Group shows that nearly 15-30 percent of the tech workforce at GCCs are still being outsourced from third-party IT service providers. This underscores the growing interest of IT and consulting firms such as Accenture, Cognizant, Tata Consultancy Services, Infosys, HCLTech, Wipro, and Tech Mahindra in setting up dedicated GCC units to capture the burgeoning demand.

According to a Nasscom-Zinnov report, India currently hosts 2,117 centres across 3,728 units, employing around 2.36 million professionals. About 96 percent of these GCCs were launched post FY21, and the ecosystem's total market size stands at $98.4 billion.

Read also: Treasury Yields Experience Largest Increase in Two Weeks Following Release of Labor Market Data

Mature GCCs are increasingly retaining 70-75 percent of their technology workforce internally to protect proprietary intellectual property and strengthen core digital engineering capabilities. However, MNCs that don't yet have a GCC in India outsource only a marginal share of their global workforce here. Once they establish a scaled GCC, outsourcing intensity nearly doubles.

Among Mega GCCs specifically, roughly one in five roles in their global workforce ecosystem runs through India-based partner networks, as per Zinnov's data. Mega GCCs refers to captives with over 5,000 professionals.

Growing Symbiosis between GCCs and IT Firms

GCCs and IT companies are growing symbiotically, with the more strategic and capable a GCC becomes, the more it relies on ecosystem partners for scalability, execution bandwidth, and specialized capabilities. The two models are becoming increasingly interdependent.

Read also: US-Iran Tensions Spark Uptick in Oil Prices Amid Global Market Decline

Barclays Global Services CEO Praveen Kumar has stated that the bank outsourced around 30-40 percent of its tech workforce in India from IT partners. Across its multiple GCC locations in the country, the UK-headquartered bank has over 32,000 employees.

Neeti Sharma, CEO, TeamLease Digital said that GCCs are still dependent on IT firms for managing and modernizing legacy platforms, migration, cybersecurity operations, and managed services. However, GCCs are now keeping more core IP, product ownership, architecture, and AI strategy work in-house while leveraging IT Services companies for execution scale and specialized talent.

Large vs Mid-Sized GCCs

These partnership terms also shift when a large GCC is compared to mid-sized GCCs, which generally have around 100 to 500 employees. According to Alouk Kumar, founder and CEO of Inductus, mega GCCs would typically try to limit their third-party outsourcing to about 10 percent to 15 percent of their total tech operations.

For a mid-tier center, collaborating with an established IT service provider or a specialized local vendor is not just a way to cut costs; it is a vital strategy for speeding up their market entry. This approach allows them to rent specialized skills and navigate the competitive Indian talent market while slowly building up their own capabilities.

Outcome-Driven Partnerships

GCCs continue to expand specialized in-house talent. In the current fiscal cycle, GCCs outpaced traditional IT majors by adding roughly 200,000 net new advanced engineering roles, contrasting sharply with the highly measured net addition of approximately 110,000 across third-party IT majors who face tighter organic growth limits, as per data from Inductus.

Industry experts said FY27 will be a structural reset in how GCCs and IT services firms work together. The new model will reward scale of capability, platforms, and AI leverage. As GCCs evolve into enterprise nerve centres, the nature of IT services partnerships is shifting meaningfully, experts said.

Goel is seeing engagements becoming more "outcome-led," AI-centric, platform-oriented, and more deeply embedded into enterprise transformation. The gradual move away from FTE (full-time employee)-led contracts toward productivity-linked and transformation-linked engagements is already visible.

While IT majors remain deeply integrated into GCC ecosystems today, competitive differentiation will depend on who can operate as an AI transformation partner, not just a traditional outsourcing vendor, experts said. TeamLease's Sharma added, "GCCs will continue building core product and AI capabilities internally, but will continue to partner for AI deployment, cloud modernization, cybersecurity, platform engineering, and rapid scaling of niche talent."