Expanding GCCs bring in more value vs new entrants

India’s global capability centre ecosystem is seeing a shift in how new centres are set up and existing ones expand, with greenfield and brownfield activity moving at similar levels but increasingly converging around capability-led work, industry experts and GCC enablers told ET.

In CY2025, India recorded about 100 new GCC entrants compared with 115-120 brownfield expansions, showing near-equal activity in unit terms across both models, according to market research firm UnearthInsight.

In value terms, however, the brownfield segment outpaces greenfield. UnearthInsight estimates the brownfield opportunity at $11-14 billion against a greenfield opportunity of $750-930 million, within an overall GCC enabler market it pegs at $12-15 billion today and projected to reach $20-25 billion by 2030.


Experts said the more important change is not the balance in numbers but the speed and ambition with which both new and existing centres are being designed.

Karthik Padmanabhan, managing partner, and Sukanya Roy, partner at global consulting firm Zinnov, said 96% of GCCs established since FY2024 came in with engineering, R&D or product development charters from day one, with 49% building artificial intelligence and machine learning capability from inception.

“New GCCs are increasingly being set up with engineering and product charters from day one,” Zinnov said, adding that the gap between setup and maturity is shrinking as centres start with higher-value mandates from the beginning.

Zinnov data shows 63% of GCCs set up in the last five years have already reached Portfolio or Transformation Hub maturity, which traditionally took five to ten years. Portfolio Hubs alone nearly doubled their share from 7% to 13% in a single year. “The old sequence of setting up a centre first and building capability later has effectively collapsed,” Padmanabhan and Roy said.

Nearly 46% of GCCs are now at Portfolio or Transformation Hub stages, where AI, engineering and product mandates are embedded into operating models either from inception or scaled rapidly within existing centres, they added.

Arindam Sen, partner and GCC sector leader at EY India, said greenfield activity remains steady with new entrants continuing to come from sectors such as healthcare, retail and manufacturing, while brownfield expansion is becoming more complex and value driven.

“The brownfield opportunity is growing in complexity and value,” Sen said, adding that companies are embedding artificial intelligence, building sector-specific expertise, and expanding into new capability areas within existing centres. He said the traditional model where centres scale gradually has changed. “Greenfield and brownfield are no longer sequential stages,” he said.

GCC enablers such as ANSR said the two models are now running in parallel, with companies choosing between them based on capability needs rather than lifecycle stage. “Expansion is driven by outcomes such as product ownership, platform development and AI-led work rather than headcount growth,” the firm said, adding that GCCs are increasingly being built as capability-led operating units rather than execution hubs.

Prasad Panchagnula, managing director and chief business officer at GCC enabler Embark, said the GCC ecosystem has expanded from about 2,700 units in FY21 to more than 3,700 units in FY26, with both new centre creation and expansion of existing centres contributing to growth.

“Greenfield creation and brownfield expansion are both contributing meaningfully,” Panchagnula said, adding that much of the current expansion is coming from existing organisations adding new mandates and increasing their India footprint. He said AI and machine learning capability building is a key driver of this growth within existing centres.

The shift is also drawing in large information technology services firms. Tata Consultancy Services has entered the GCC enablement space with a dedicated Global Value and Innovation Centres business unit aimed at building AI-native GCCs and upgrading existing centres into value and innovation-led operating models, a sign of the trend in the GCC build-and-transform ecosystem. UnearthInsight data shows the greenfield enabler landscape has expanded 15 times in a decade, with more than 150 players now competing for the 80-100 new GCCs entering India annually.

“The central challenge now is not the pipeline of new centres, which remains healthy, but whether the large share of India’s GCC base still at lower maturity stages can make the leap that the leading 46% already have,” said Padmanabhan and Roy.

Zinnov projects that 75% of GCCs will target higher maturity over the next five years, moving from execution-focused operations to becoming primary engines of value creation for their global enterprises, but that transition requires genuine capability building in AI, platform engineering and talent strategy alongside leadership with global mandates.

“The centres that close that gap fastest will define where India’s next wave of GCC value gets created,” they said. “The ones that do not risk being left in the execution tier even as the ecosystem around them matures.”