India’s Global Capability Centres (GCCs) are increasingly deepening ties with consulting and IT services firms, as they navigate rapid shifts in artificial intelligence, cybersecurity, and global product ownership. The move marks a shift towards hybrid operating models, particularly among mid-sized centres balancing capability-building with speed and cost pressures.
Industry leaders say this growing reliance on external partners is not a sign of structural weakness, but a deliberate strategy.
“GCCs are not structurally dependent on external partners, nor is this a temporary gap,” said Arindam Sen, Partner and GCC Sector Lead – Technology, Media & Entertainment and Telecommunications at EY India. “The reliance is often intentional and strategic. GCCs may consciously choose not to insource everything to avoid fixed-cost lock-in, reduce risk, and maintain flexibility.”
Instead, many GCCs are choosing to keep high-value, complex problem-solving in-house, while tapping external partners for specialised skills and speed. This is particularly visible in fast-evolving areas such as artificial intelligence.
“Areas such as AI are evolving too rapidly across agentic AI, GenAI, and platforms, for it to be efficient or cost-effective to internalise everything,” Sen said. “GCCs may deliberately leverage partner ecosystems to accelerate innovation, access specialist capabilities, and maintain speed and resilience, while retaining strategic ownership and decision-making control in-house.”
Shalini Pillay, Partner & India Leader – Global Capability Centres at KPMG in India, described the shift as part of an ongoing evolution rather than a structural reset.
“Adopting Hybrid Operating Models has been core to the evolution of the model… GCCs have increasingly leveraged third parties to bridge some very fundamental gaps,” she said.
According to Pillay, the current phase is being driven by three factors: “1) AI velocity gap 2) infrastructure and speed of adoption and 3) skills asymmetry.” She added, “This is not a structural transition but a transition phase driven by the pace of AI adoption and digital transformation.”
As global enterprises struggle to prepare for AI at scale, GCCs are increasingly using external partners to build readiness. “They are leveraging third party to get better prepared from a data readiness, process intelligence and hence organisation readiness perspective,” Pillay said.
At the same time, the nature of these partnerships is changing. “The model of engagement with the third-party ecosystem has changed quite significantly too… increasingly outcome driven – a transition from labour arbitrage to being capability led and outcome driven,” she noted.
The hybrid approach is also being used as a safeguard against premature investments in emerging technologies. Pillay pointed to what she described as an “AI FOMO” effect across the industry, where rapid hiring has inflated costs without clear returns.
“In most cases, the ROI is not commensurate with the investments made,” she said. “Given this, it makes eminent sense to establish the sandbox environment to experiment with the AI use cases outside of the GCC, by leveraging third-party.”
Once a successful proof of concept is established, capabilities can be brought in-house. “Most GCCs will leverage their vendor base in the transition period, while the end goal will be to ensure full ownership and operational authority within the GCC,” she added.
The trend is also beginning to reflect in deal flow. HCLTech CEO C Vijayakumar said in the company’s Q4 press conference that it is seeing more business coming from mid-level GCCs.
