A seat at the table: What India’s GCC leaders want next
Global capability centres (GCCs) in India have moved well past their cost-saving origins. But how much real decision-making power do they actually hold? That question ran through a leadership roundtable hosted by Mint and Oliver Wyman in Bengaluru, bringing together senior India leaders from Cisco, Target, Samsung, Harman, Dell, Hexaware, Mercedes-Benz, Wells Fargo, SAP Fioneer, The Standard, Siemens, SBM Offshore, Smith + Howard and Nutanix. Moderating the evening, Mint’s Consulting Editor Leslie D’Monte structured the discussion around four threads: strategy and ownership, the AI opportunity, talent and leadership and how GCCs are ‘rewiring’ with their global headquarters.
Setting the context for the roundtable, Sumit Sarawgi, Partner, Oliver Wyman, said scale alone no longer sets GCC apart. It is now table stakes. The real divide, he argued, is decision-making power: 83% of GCCs are called “mission critical” by their headquarters, yet he estimates that only a fraction actually hold budget or product-ownership authority. Talent is now the top concern for roughly half the GCCs Oliver Wyman works with, he added, and many companies’ AI ambitions are running well ahead of what they can execute.
Ownership is still a work in progress
That gap set the tone for the ownership debate that followed, where several leaders agreed there is distance still to cover. Dr Vinoth Venkataraman, Executive Director at Wells Fargo’s Consumer Model Development Centre, said most GCCs remain execution-focused, only gradually shifting toward outcome-based ownership. Here, success is measured by impact, not delivery volume. Vishal Nair, Director of India Operations at Smith + Howard, put it more bluntly: “It’s no longer about ownership, it’s about global leadership.” Headquarters are investing in training India-based leaders, he said, though with 70-75% of his firm’s business still from North America, some functions simply need to stay close to customers.
For companies further along, that shift already defines how they describe themselves. Daisy Chittilapilly, Site Leader at Cisco India, traced three decades of change: “We have gone through cost arbitrage… scale arbitrage… and now we are in innovation arbitrage” – filing patents and building India-first products. Krishna Kumar G, Country Head at Harman International, made a related point using numbers instead: India is under 5% of Harman’s global revenue, so cost discipline still matters, but with just 40 cars per 1,000 people in India against 950 in the US, and 600 each in Japan and Germany, the market’s sheer headroom justifies deeper strategic bets.
Newer centres, meanwhile, argued their advantage is a blank slate. Mohua Sengupta, SVP & Country Head at The Standard India has built a “two-in-a-box” model pairing her India CIO and AI heads directly with their global counterparts, so strategy is co-owned from day one instead of inherited later, avoiding what she called the “service mindset” that held back older GCCs. Deepak Sharma, Head of Banking Solutions at SAP Fioneer, put the bar for that ownership simply: “Strategic ownership is when you start becoming accountable for business outcomes – organisation outcomes, customer transformation outcomes.”
That same headquarters-GCC gap came up from the Oliver Wyman side too. Bastian Lux, Partner, Oliver Wyman who works closely with client headquarters, said leadership abroad often has little sense of the full potential of India’s GCC ecosystem, defaulting to cost over value in conversation after conversation. Johannes Brinkkoetter, Partner, Marsh agreed, adding that GCCs, though internal customers, still deserve to market their wins: “We have been far too humble to promote the achievements we bring to the table.”
AI adoption versus transformation
The AI conversation split along a similar line. While some leaders are treating it as a tool to adopt, others are building it into their identity. Tejshree Madhu of Siemens Technology said her team set its own innovation mandate years ago, lifting first-time-innovator output by roughly 250%, and is now applying that same self-starting approach to AI, putting itself among Siemens’ global front-runners.
Mohan Rao, Managing Director & Corporate VP at Samsung, described a similar ambition at greater scale: the company has declared 2026 its AI transformation year, pushing R&D toward becoming AI-native, with Bengaluru now leading a new regional cluster for sharing best practices. Brathaban Karuppaiah of SBM Offshore India offered a smaller-scale version of the same arc, from a cost-arbitrage engineering centre set up in late 2019 to what he now calls a “project execution centre”, proving value each time an India-born idea scales across the wider enterprise.
The one change GCC leaders would make
Closing the session, D’Monte asked each panellist for one change GCC leaders must make, in a single line and the answers landed on a common note. Harikrishna Aravindakshan of Target said leaders must “be responsible for the outcome, irrespective of geography”.
Sengupta returned to call for “continuous creation of value”, paired with clear ownership and accountability. Meghana Alexander of Mercedes-Benz said: “Don’t have the fear to be bold, and don’t focus on the cost, focus on the value.” Kavita Mehra of Dell Technologies pushed the framing further: “Move away from site leadership to global leadership, whatever that means for you”. And Aditya Jayaraman, CEO of Hexaware India, closed the round by saying: “Steve Jobs didn’t ask anybody for a mandate to invent the iPhone… go figure out how you will do that for your business, and do it fast. Life is short, time is short.”
A common thread had emerged by the end of the discussion: India’s GCCs have largely proven they can execute. The open question is whether they will be handed the mandate to lead or, as more than one speaker suggested, simply take it.
