India’s GCCs Emerge as Global Epicenter for Enterprise AI Talent

A new industry study confirms India’s ascent as the world’s largest and fastest-growing hub for enterprise AI talent, driven by the rapid transformation of Global Capability Centers (GCCs).

According to the AI Talent Trends in India’s GCCs – Report 2025 by ANSR and Wizmatic, Fortune 500 GCCs in the country now employ over 126,600 professionals in AI-aligned roles, positioning them as the global engine for the adoption of AI, Generative AI, and Agentic AI.

GCCs Transition to AI Innovation Command Hubs

The report highlights a significant evolution in the GCC operating model, noting a major shift from execution centers to core AI innovation command hubs.

AI-aligned talent now constitutes 13% of the entire Fortune 500 GCC workforce, with the centers accounting for 22.5% of India’s total AI talent demand.

Crucially, more than 18,300 of these professionals are core AI experts, focusing on specialized domains like MLOps, LLM engineering, and GenAI platform development.

For every core AI role, GCCs deploy an additional five to six adjacently-skilled professionals to facilitate scaling and deployment.

This transition will accelerate, with many GCCs projected to become Cognitive Intelligence Hubs by 2028, directly aligning with global boardroom strategy.

Unprecedented Talent Growth and Geographic Leaders

India’s overall AI talent concentration has surged by an impressive 252% between 2016 and 2024, positioning the country at 2.51 times the global average.

This domestic growth has helped to reverse the long-standing “brain drain” trend, as senior AI talent is increasingly retained due to the high-impact nature of GCC roles, competitive compensation, and access to global-scale problem statements.

Geographically, Bengaluru remains the dominant hub, housing 30% of the total AI workforce.

Meanwhile, Hyderabad has rapidly emerged as India’s fastest-growing AI GCC hub, anchored by the presence of major cloud providers.

Chennai and Pune continue to strengthen specialized AI capabilities, particularly across BFSI, industrial, and healthcare sectors.

Industry Adoption and Closing the Global Talent Gap

AI hiring is led primarily by three key sectors. Technology & SaaS accounts for 24% of the demand, focusing on LLMOps and model fine-tuning.

BFSI (22%) concentrates on fraud analytics and credit risk modeling, while Retail & e-commerce (11%) prioritizes personalization and recommendation engines.

Despite a projected global AI talent deficit, the report offers an optimistic outlook for India, where the AI workforce is expanding at a robust 16.4% CAGR.

This rapid growth, driven by aggressive reskilling and government-industry collaboration, places India on track to close its high-skill AI talent gap within the decade.

Vikram Ahuja, Co-Founder of ANSR, underscored the significance of this milestone, stating that India and its GCCs are stepping into a “historic leadership role.”

He concluded that this convergence of talent depth and enterprise ambition will define the future, predicting that nearly all mature GCCs will operate specialized teams in areas like agentic AI, multi-modal model development, and LLM governance by 2030.

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