Adidas’ reported cuts at its Gurugram technology hub are easy to read as another restructuring story. The harder question is what they reveal about the economics of India’s GCC model as AI begins changing not only jobs, but the amount of human capacity required to deliver global work.
Adidas confirmed that it is reducing roles within its India Technology organisation. Reports citing people familiar with the matter put the Gurugram impact at around 350 employees from a workforce of roughly 700, including engineers, data scientists and data engineers. However, Adidas has not confirmed that figure. According to Reuters, the company said the impact across its India Technology organisation is less than 20%, while its website shows nearly 650 employees across its Gurgaon and Chennai technology hubs. The discrepancy matters less than the question it raises.
The number that matters
India now has 2,117 GCCs across 3,728 units, according to the Zinnov-Nasscom India GCC Landscape FY2026 report. Of these, 506 are backed by Forbes Global 2000 companies, while 583 are mid-market and 504 are PE-backed GCCs. The ecosystem has grown 32% since FY2021.
Yet headcount growth is becoming a less reliable measure of GCC expansion. HFS Research, based on a survey of 47 GCC leaders, found that 47% of the centres surveyed were either flat or declining in headcount over the previous 12 months. This is not a census of India’s 2,117 GCCs, but it is an indication of the changing workforce equation.
For the largest multinationals, restructuring can be absorbed across geographies and functions. Smaller and mid-sized centres have less room to absorb a sudden change in their cost equation. And that equation is changing.
The human unit is under pressure
The traditional GCC proposition was built around human capacity. More work meant more FTEs, more teams and more managerial layers. Agentic AI challenges that logic.
If an AI-enabled team can deliver the output that previously required substantially more people, the client increasingly cares less about how many humans performed the work and more about the outcome delivered.
The commercial model is changing too. LTM, formerly LTIMindtree, has introduced BlueVerse Currency, an AI-linked commercial model that prices enterprise work by outcomes rather than effort consumed. It combines people, AI agents, platforms, accelerators and compute into a single commercial construct. The significance for GCCs is not that they will adopt this particular model, but that the underlying unit of value is changing, from human effort towards measurable business outcomes.
The question for GCCs is therefore shifting from how many people they can employ to how much enterprise value they can produce with each person.
If some jobs disappear, what replaces them?
This is the part of the AI transition that receives considerably less attention.
Zinnov’s 2026 GCC talent research points to a shift away from routine and legacy technology work towards AI, cybersecurity, cloud and data capabilities. It identifies AI engineers, prompt engineers, forward-deployed engineers, AI forensic specialists, data annotators and data-governance leads among the roles gaining momentum.
That creates a difficult transition.
The person displaced from routine software testing is not automatically qualified to become an AI evaluation engineer. The data engineer whose work is partially automated does not necessarily become an agent-orchestration specialist overnight.
So the question is not simply whether GCC employment rises or falls. It is who gets employed, doing what work, and at what level of skill.
That distinction matters because the emerging roles are generally more specialised than the roles being automated. AI may therefore create new employment without necessarily replacing every job it displaces on a one-for-one basis.
For GCCs, the challenge is to turn that transition into reskilling and redeployment rather than simply treating productivity gains as a headcount exercise.
Then comes Washington
The H-1B debate adds another variable. The Trump administration’s original $100,000 H-1B payment was struck down, while the US has since moved towards a new fee proposal exceeding $100,000. Economist Santosh Mehrotra told ANI that higher H-1B costs could accelerate the movement of technology work to India-based GCCs rather than moving workers to the US.
The counterfactual is worth asking. If the H-1B barrier disappeared tomorrow, how much of today’s GCC expansion would remain?
The underlying India story clearly predates Washington’s intervention. The Zinnov-Nasscom data shows GCC numbers have grown 32% since FY2021. But immigration policy can influence the pace and economics of that expansion.
That makes the next phase of the GCC story particularly consequential. Growth may increasingly be measured not by how many people a centre employs, but by how much global work it can absorb, which skills that work requires and how many humans are needed to deliver it.
Adidas, then, is not necessarily the warning. The warning is assuming that GCC growth will continue to mean more jobs in the same roles that built the industry.
