The Rise of AI-Powered Global Capability Centers (AI-GCC): Why Enterprises Need Them Now

As enterprises work to quickly adapt in this rapidly evolving age of AI, experts say that AI-powered Global Capability Centers (AI-GCCs) are now essential for businesses of any size, whether they have a few hundred or thousands of employees. CB Herald has undertaken extensive research on this topic after engaging with experts and AI-GCC pioneers that have been featured in this CB Herald article.

Global Capability Centers (GCCs), sometimes called captives, global in-house centers, shared service or tech hubs, or Centers of Excellence, are fully owned parts of a company that focus on high-value work like engineering, data and AI, design, finance, risk, and customer experience in locations with strong talent and lower costs. Unlike outsourcing, a GCC is run by the company itself, keeping its own culture, intellectual property (IP), plans, and security, but set up where the skills and costs are most favorable.

“Think of AI-GCC as an AI-powered solutions factory that can substantially scale your enterprise capability,” explains Anil Chintapalli, Chairman of People360, Managing Partner at Human Capital Development, and Senior Advisor to McKinsey & Company. CB Herald’s assessment indicates that over the past decade, People360 has helped successfully operationalize over 40 GCCs, utilizing an industrialized operating blueprint to help enterprises expediently establish and cost-effectively operate GCCs. “AI-GCC should ship outcomes (such as product features, models, analytics, know-your-customer decisions, and anti-money laundering decisions), not just deliver cost savings and can service the entire gamut of all your enterprise needs at an accelerated speed to market (and of course, with significant cost optimization): procurement, finance and accounting, human resources, information technology, sales and marketing operations, and so on.”

Anil, who also serves on the Forbes Business Council and the Fast Company Executive Board, outlined that the anatomy of AI-GCC has four key components:

• Scope: Focus on optimizing software engineering, Artificial Intelligence (AI), Machine learning (ML), and cybersecurity operations, among others.
• Operating model: Product-centric technology and operations operated by agentic AI workforce squads mapped to business outcomes with shared enablement.
• Footprint: Flagship hubs in regions like India, plus satellite hubs to ensure business continuity.
• Governance: On-shore business owns what and why; AI-GCC leadership owns how and who; centralized guardrails for risk, architecture, and financial metrics (including return on investment).

Based on CB Herald’s assessment, its worthwhile to note that Anil has done pioneering work in not only design and deployment of agentic AI workforce squads and aligning them to business outcomes but also helping Fortune 500 enterprises successfully achieve transformative outcomes on their AI investments.

Value Drivers

According to Hemanth Gullapalli, Co-founder and Director of People360, the value drivers of AI-GCC are:

1. Speed and focus: Integrated cross-functional technology and operations teams work directly on your business goals (and quantifiable business outcomes), rather than just focusing on traditional service level agreements. This leads to faster project cycles and fewer handoffs.
2. Structural cost advantage: Achieve reductions in total cost of ownership (TCO) between 45% and 65% by creating and managing agentic workforce organizations that have highly optimized team structures and business processes. Importantly, People360’s proprietary operating model (IP) enables enterprises to have a GCC operational within 4-6 months.
3. Talent access at scale: Tap into deep talent pools for AI, cybersecurity, and digital infrastructure and operations. In certain locations, the quality of new hires for specific (niche) skills is higher than what you could find locally for the same cost.
4. IP and security control: Your data remains secure within company boundaries, minimizing third-party risk.
5. Resilience: Using multiple hubs allows for continuous operations around the world and helps diversify against geopolitical risks.
6. AI at scale: AI-GCCs are ideal for managing AI platforms, data governance, and model development.

High-Impact Use Cases

According to Swaroopa Gorantla, Co-founder and Director of People360, AI-GCCs deliver maximum value in:

• Digital and engineering: such as (but not limited to) product squads, cloud migrations, Platform/Site Reliability Engineering (SRE), Developer Experience (DevEx), and test automation.
• Data and AI: such as (but not limited to) Lakehouse, Master Data Management (MDM), ML engineering, decisioning (such as pricing, fraud, and churn), and knowledge assistants.
• Risk and cybersecurity: such as (but not limited to) threat intel, Know Your Customer (KYC) analytics, and Identity and Access Management (IAM) engineering.
• Middle and back office: Agentic operations for finance & accounting, procurement, HR, legal, and supply chain.
• Customer and growth ops: Agentic operations for sales and marketing, Customer Relationship Management (CRM), Revenue Growth Management (RGM), and Revenue Cycle Management (RCM).

In this increasingly volatile market environment, as enterprises strive to navigate increasing pressure to innovate faster while controlling costs, CB Herald’s deliberations with industry experts have put the spotlight on a select group of specialist firms such as People360 who can help enterprises build and operate AI-GCCs. Importantly, AI-GCC reduces reliance on third-party vendors for AI development, thereby mitigating IP and security risks for an enterprise. With global regulations tightening, keeping data processing and AI development within a captive GCC environment ensures better compliance than outsourcing to third-party service providers. 

An AI-GCC is thus a strategic asset that delivers competitive advantage and operational resilience, while mitigating execution risk resulting in substantive shareholder value creation.