Nearly 500 GCCs in India have not reached their full potential as growth hits a plateau: UnearthIQ & Embark Report
Nearly 500 GCCs in India are not realising their full potential and have begun to plateau, as per the findings of UnearthIQ and Embark’s “The Great Plateau: Why GCCs are Unable to Reach their Full Potential” report.
Around 30% of GCCs established after 2020 have already plateaued, representing nearly 140–150 GCCs. Combined with an estimated 360–370 GCCs established before 2020 facing similar challenges, the total number of plateaued GCCs in India is approaching a meaningful count of 500-520.
This comes at a time when India’s GCC sector continues to witness strong momentum. The country is expected to host around 2,500 plus GCCs by 2030, driven by strong global demand, policy tailwinds, and the rapid rise of next-gen nano GCCs anchored in AI, digital, and innovation-led functions. However, as enterprise expectations shift from cost efficiency to business impact, ownership, and innovation, not all GCCs are evolving and maturing at the same pace.
“The plateau is not a sign of failure; it is a sign that the GCC model in India has reached an inflection point. Most GCCs are built to scale delivery. Few are designed to sustain relevance. The difference lies in design strength and execution discipline.
Historically, much focus has been on developing playbooks for setting up GCCs, while very little investment has been made in identifying frameworks and interventions to fully realise their potential. We hope this report is the first step in that direction and will generate a healthy debate on this subject,” said Gaurav Vasu and Shail Maniar, Co-founders of UnearthIQ.
Early signs of a GCC plateauing include organisations still being seen mainly as a cost lever rather than a value creator; business impact flattening even as headcount grows; slower decision-making due to added governance layers; attrition among high performers; and effort being absorbed by legacy systems while AI and platform work stalls at the pilot stage.
The plateauing is often driven by structural factors rather than operational performance alone. Execution-focused mandates, limited leadership autonomy, weak alignment with evolving enterprise priorities, underinvestment in AI and platform capabilities, and fragmented technology and data foundations are preventing some GCCs from moving to higher-value roles within the enterprise.
“As India’s GCC growth story gathers pace and new centres get set up, we believe the frameworks and interventions in this report will help enablers and GCC sponsors build organisations designed for long-term relevance and not just a successful Day 0, but a thriving Day 1000 and beyond. The centres that define this next phase, will be the ones that get the foundational choices right early, from the right governance model, the right talent strategy, and the right technology backbone to scale on”, said Aravind Maiya, Co-founder & CEO at Embark.
To break the plateau, GCCs need to redefine their mandate around enterprise value rather than cost, strengthen leadership and earn a seat in enterprise decision-making, reset governance towards outcome-based accountability, rebuild capability depth in high-impact skills such as AI and data, and modernise their technology foundation so innovation can scale from pilots to production.
