Artificial intelligence (AI) poses a “real threat” to global capability centres (GCCs) built around routine, repetitive work, but India should use the technology to move these centres up the value chain, Chief Economic Adviser (CEA) V Anantha Nageswaran said on Thursday.
“If a centre’s value rests only on doing simple tasks at low cost, then that value is under real threat. We should not pretend otherwise,” Nageswaran said while addressing the Confederation of Indian Industry’s GCC Summit 2026.
The centres that fail to adapt would suffer, while those moving up the value chain would thrive, he said. “The risk is real, but it is not destiny,” he added.
“A country that treats a powerful technology as fate will be shaped by it. A country that treats it as a tool will shape it instead. India must be firmly in the second group,” Nageswaran said. “Not passive recipients of what the technology does to us, but active authors of what we do with it.”
Highlighting the evolution of India’s GCC ecosystem, the CEA said multinational companies initially came to India for lower costs but stayed because of the country’s capabilities.
“What began as support became engineering. What began as engineering became product. What began as a back office became, in many firms, the place where global decisions are now made,” he said.
India, which had only a handful of back offices two decades ago, now hosts more than 2,000 GCCs employing over 2 million professionals, generating more than $64 billion in revenue and contributing around 2 per cent to the country’s gross domestic product (GDP), he said.
Around half of the world’s GCCs are now located in India, Nageswaran added.
