At a time when GCCs are redefining enterprise operating models, Rajat Raheja, Division President, Amdocs India, believes the shift has been nothing short of structural. What began as a cost-arbitrage strategy has steadily transformed into a strategic engine powering innovation, product ownership, and long-term enterprise value.
“Over the last decade, GCCs have undergone one of the most consequential shifts in enterprise operating models,” Raheja says. “What began as a cost-arbitrage construct, focused on efficiency and scale, has gradually evolved into a strategic engine for innovation, product ownership, and long-term value creation.”
India, he asserts, stands firmly at the centre of this transformation. With nearly 1,800 GCCs employing close to two million professionals, the country today represents what he calls “the most mature and strategically embedded GCC ecosystem globally.” At Amdocs, that journey has mirrored the broader industry arc. “We’ve moved from executing narrowly scoped, remotely managed work to teams in India taking end-to-end responsibility for complex product lines, platforms, and transformation programs,” he explains. The evolution has also meant aligning India GCC KPIs directly with global organisational goals, an unmistakable signal that the centre is no longer peripheral.
Yet scale alone does not guarantee readiness. Raheja draws a sharp distinction between available talent and enterprise-ready talent. “India’s talent pool is undeniably large, but the real distinction today is between available talent and enterprise-ready talent,” he notes. The readiness gap, he says, becomes visible in deep expertise roles, AI, advanced data engineering, platform services, and product thinking, where hands-on experience operating complex systems at scale remains limited.
“While organisations are investing heavily in upskilling and reskilling, the challenge is more about real-time exposure, owning production systems, making architectural trade-offs, and managing enterprise risk,” he explains. Emerging roles across LLM fine-tuning, MLOps, FinOps, cloud security, and AI governance are still evolving. The gap, he argues, will only close through tighter industry-academia collaboration, stronger apprenticeship models, and, critically, more opportunities for India-based teams to own platforms end-to-end.
Ultimately, he frames the job-ready versus future-ready debate as a question of learning velocity. “Organisations that cultivate continuous learning cultures will address this gap sustainably. Those waiting for fully prepared candidates will find themselves persistently constrained,” he says. The onus, in his view, lies as much with enterprises as with individuals.
As GCCs move from execution to ownership, the shift is not merely operational but cultural. Raheja believes the first barrier to dismantle is the “parent-child” mindset that still shadows some global structures. “We need to stop looking at GCCs as offshore centres,” he states plainly. The responsibility to reframe this narrative, he says, rests largely with GCC leadership.
For ownership to be authentic, integration must be structural. GCCs need to be embedded into the global matrix, represent a broad functional mix, and bring niche, location-agnostic roles into India. Equally critical is leadership depth. “Profiling and grooming future-ready talent across levels is essential so leaders and managers from GCCs are prepared to step into global roles,” he says. Reducing remote management layers and fostering ecosystem partnerships with academia and startups further accelerates innovation maturity.
The rise of AI and GenAI has only intensified this transformation. According to Raheja, these technologies are dissolving traditional role boundaries. “AI and GenAI are not just new technologies; they are fundamentally dissolving traditional role boundaries,” he explains. The once-clear distinctions between engineering, data, and product are blurring into integrated, capability-based squads.
At Amdocs India, the emphasis has been on internal reskilling and cross-functional collaboration. Engineers, data scientists, and domain experts now work in integrated teams tackling end-to-end business problems. “Employees today need to embrace the fact of building software or solutions using agents, knowing fully that part of their work is getting redundant and would be managed by agents,” he says candidly. Rather than resisting automation, the organisation is encouraging bottom-up AI adoption by providing tools, training, and live project exposure.
Leadership localisation, meanwhile, has become a strategic lever rather than a symbolic milestone. As global organisations entrust India with increasingly complex mandates, the ability to run global charters from within the country has moved from aspiration to expectation. “This is about owning outcomes, influencing stakeholders across geographies, and making trade-offs that balance speed, quality, and risk,” Raheja says.
At Amdocs, leadership development has been deliberate and long-term. High-potential professionals are identified early, given cross-unit and cross-site exposure, groomed in customer-facing roles, and supported in building internal and external networks. “This did not happen in a year,” he reflects. “It is the result of structured development and giving people the platform to lead across geographies.”
Looking ahead, Raheja is clear that scale alone will not define the winners. “Scale alone will not differentiate future leaders,” he says. The real differentiators will be innovation velocity, domain ownership, and ecosystem integration. GCCs that operate in isolation risk stagnation, while those deeply integrated with hyperscalers, startups, academic institutions, and industry bodies will move faster and innovate more sustainably.
Domain depth, particularly in complex industries like telecommunications, will also separate leaders from generic engineering centres. “Innovation will not be measured by patents filed, but by how quickly enterprise-grade capabilities move from experimentation to production,” he asserts.
For Amdocs India, that strategy is already in motion, deepening telecom-specific AI capabilities, expanding ecosystem partnerships, and investing in leadership systems designed to scale learning faster than the market. In Raheja’s telling, the story of India’s GCC rise is no longer about cost or capacity. It is about ownership, capability, and the confidence to lead from within.