India's 2100 GCCs Have A New Problem To Solve: Building One Culture Across Two Continents

Global capability centres now account for 42% of The Thought Bulb’s corporate business, up from 30% in 2022. The Gurugram-based corporate team-building and leadership training company says GCC clients are no longer asking for one-off fun days. They want onboarding programs for new joiners and leadership offsites for site heads, typically built around leadership outcomes.

That demand mirrors how fast the sector has grown and changed. According to the Nasscom–Zinnov report GCC Value Orbit, released in July 2026, India hosts 2,117 GCCs employing about 2.36 million professionals, with market revenue of about $98.4 billion. Some 96% of GCCs set up since FY21 started with a product or portfolio remit rather than back-office tasks, more than 1,200 have embedded AI and machine-learning capabilities, and 64% of site leaders hold dual roles that combine global functional ownership with running the India centre.

From delivery engine to decision-maker

That shift brings a people challenge that headcount alone cannot solve. A centre that once executed instructions from Frankfurt or New Jersey is now expected to own products, challenge assumptions and make decisions on behalf of the global business.

“The mandate has moved from ‘do what you’re told’ to ‘tell us what we should do’,” says Nitin Sharma, co-founder of The Thought Bulb. “That needs a very different team culture: more ownership, more cross-border trust, and managers who can lead people they’ve hired in the last six months.”

Co-founder Nishit Lal says the pressure lands hardest on middle managers. “Most GCC managers were promoted for technical excellence. Almost overnight they’re leading 30 people, half of whom joined this year, and answering to a boss in another time zone,” he says. “They need practice at leading, not another slide deck about it.”

Why GCCs are investing in team culture

Three pressures are pushing GCC leaders to treat culture-building as a business priority rather than an HR perk:

1. Speed of hiring. Centres scaling from a few hundred to a few thousand people in two or three years end up with large cohorts of new joiners and first-time managers at once. Shared ways of working have to be built deliberately.
2. The headquarters gap. Distance, time zones and cultural differences can leave India teams feeling like suppliers rather than colleagues. Leaders want visiting global executives and local teams to genuinely connect.
3. Retention in a hot market. With GCCs competing with each other and with product companies for AI and engineering talent, belonging and growth matter as much as pay.

The firm’s work with centres of global companies ranges from onboarding new joiners to offsites that bring visiting global executives and India leadership teams together.

What effective programs look like

The most effective GCC programs, according to Nitin, share a few traits:

• Tied to the mandate. A centre taking over product ownership needs exercises in decision-making and accountability, not generic fun.
• Designed for mixed audiences. Programs that bring visiting global leaders and India teams together work best when they create shared problems to solve, not presentations to sit through.
• Built for scale. Large centres need formats that run for 50 or 5,000 people with consistent quality, often across several cities.
• Measured. GCC leaders report to global boards and expect evidence of change, such as engagement scores, attrition among new joiners or manager effectiveness.

“GCCs are run by very metrics-driven leaders,” says Sharma. “They’ll invest in culture, but they want to see it move a number. That’s pushed the whole industry to design programs around outcomes, not just experiences.”

The road to 2030

As the sector keeps scaling, India will add many more GCC roles, a growing share of them in AI-heavy functions. The centres that convert that scale into real influence within their global organisations will be the ones that get the human side right: confident managers, connected teams, and a culture that feels part of the global company rather than an outpost of it.

For India’s GCC leaders, the next phase of growth is as much about building teams as building capability.