India's GCCs Are Cutting Thousands of Jobs While Hiring Thousands More

2026-07-16 — management consulting India

I was talking to an HR lead at a bank last week. She said they were automating 40% of their support function by June.

Six thousand GCC jobs disappeared in 2025. Gone.

But here's the thing that keeps people up at night: multinationals are hiring like the jobs never existed. Net GCC employment across India went up by 135,000 to 150,000 roles last year, even with those six thousand people losing their seats. A hundred and one brand new GCCs opened. Another 115 or 120 existing ones got bigger. So the math doesn't make sense on the surface, which is exactly why I spend half my time explaining it to people who are understandably confused.

Technicolor cut roughly 3,000 people. Ford's AUMOVIO unit dumped around 1,000. Fidelity, Wells Fargo, Target, Boeing, Renault Nissan, Avaya, Oracle—the list goes on, and most of them didn't even announce their numbers. The parent companies ran models. They looked at what AI could do to L1 support, manual QA testing, routine coding, basic finance work, HR operations, compliance. They did the math. They liked what they saw. The cuts started happening.

Zinnov says 55% of the roles sitting in GCCs right now face significant automation risk. We're talking about a workforce of 2.3 million people, more or less, and just over half of them are in the crosshairs. A banking center with 4,000 people looks different by 2028—somewhere between 2,400 and 2,800. That's not some worst-case scenario someone dreamed up. That's the strategy memo.

Where the actual hiring happens

The 510,000 hiring target for 2026 has teeth to it because it's not imaginary. Sixty-four percent of those roles are flagged for AI skills. AI and ML positions are growing at 38% year on year, and companies are paying 21% premiums for them compared to non-AI work. That's real money moving. Cybersecurity roles got 20% pay bumps. Data science and analytics is accelerating faster than anything else in the sector.

The geographic story is different from what most of us expected, actually, that's not quite right—I expected it wrong. Tier-2 cities outside Bengaluru, Hyderabad, and Pune are growing their GCC footprint at 23% every year. Four out of five GCC leaders say retention is stronger in those secondary locations. The old play of stacking everyone in a metro hub is becoming someone else's problem. The new play is cheaper and more spread out.

What actually happens inside management consultancies right now is this: We're running two completely separate engagements at the same time, and both of them are growing. One is workforce transformation—help a company shrink the right way, retrain the people you're keeping, figure out what gets automated and what stays human. The other is GCC strategy for multinationals that haven't set up here yet but are watching their competitors consolidate. One engagement is about cutting smartly. The other is about building from scratch.

The person inside these centers feels something different.

The routine roles are leaving. The path from L1 support to AI engineering doesn't look like it does in a consultant's retraining plan, whatever the glossy version says. Indian HR leaders expect a 383% jump in agentic AI adoption by 2027. That's the kind of shift that doesn't reabsorb the workers it displaces. Not quickly. Not without funding at a scale most organizations aren't committing to yet.

It's not a jobs crisis. It's a swap. The 6,000 cuts hit the news. The 510,000 hires get the LinkedIn posts. What's actually happening is the skills gap that sits between those two numbers—and neither the multinationals nor the people advising them have really figured out how to close it.