Global Capability Centers (GCC) are powerful assets that can deliver significant competitive benefits – but most of them fail before they can scale.

Why do many GCCs fail?

With an appetite for innovation hubs, in India alone, multinational organizations have already established some 3,000 GCCs and it’s estimated a couple at least two launch every week. But the harsh reality is this: most are destined to fail. Given their size – any serious GCC will employ at least 10,000 people – these are significant undertakings, and failure can be costly. Understanding the factors that contribute to this attrition rate is key to improving chances of success.

In my experience at Capgemini, I’ve assisted multinationals with the planning required to establish GCCs, help them scale up, and leverage them to deliver meaningful business value. Here are four important opportunities I’ve identified that companies must consider.

Choose the right operating model

Before setting up a GCC, companies should understand the purpose and scope of the initiative with concrete and detailed KPIs. Establishing a GCC is more complex than simply hiring talent and renting office space, typically taking 6-12 months, with the timeline depending on factors like strategic planning, legal and regulatory processes, infrastructure setup, and getting experts in required fields and importantly the assistance of partners.

 In the past we’ve helped clients set up GCCs from scratch – with approaches ranging from a build-operate-transfer ( BOT) model to a managed services model in which Capgemini is responsible for all aspects of the GCC on an ongoing basis. In other cases, we’ve helped clients with existing GCCs scale up or bridge capability gaps. Understanding the operating models and opportunities of each approach will help the enterprise choose the model that works best for it.

Design to add measurable value

Regardless of the model, for a GCC to succeed it must continuously add value to the enterprise. Here again, there are multiple possible approaches – from offering more services, to engaging in more complex work.

Organizations often struggle with how best to leverage their GCC – which is why Capgemini has developed tools to help clients continuously push the centers to deliver year-over-year productivity gains. For instance, our rAIse AI solution toolkit has become a game changer for many of our enterprise customers, who have used it to adopt a persona driven approach to improve reusability of their AI assets and through this increased their implementation speed (& adoption), and enhanced trust in AI deployments in a cost efficient manner.

Attract the right talent

The rapid growth of GCCs in recent years means companies are competing for the same talent pool. A multinational with little or no local experience greatly benefits from engaging a strategic partner such as Capgemini to help recruit, train, and manage the necessary personnel – from providing talent on an as-needed basis, to staffing and managing the GCC on the client’s behalf.

Moreover, as the nature of work changes, many established GCCs are taking notice that today’s professionals are increasingly looking at non-financial benefits when choosing where to work. These include location flexibility, the variety of working on diverse projects across multiple industrial sectors, and the opportunity to climb the organizational ladder or transfer within the organization across geographies – including to other countries.

For these or other reasons, many professionals may favor working with companies like Capgemini, where establishing and running GCCs is just one of the many career opportunities. Working with a strategic partner such as Capgemini, gives these enterprises access to this talent pool as well.

Plan today for agentic AI

Finally, it’s important to understand – and plan for – the significant effects agentic AI is having on GCCs. Agentic AI – artificial intelligence that can operate with minimal human oversight – is poised to invert the traditional employment pyramid in which 80 percent of staff do the work while 20 percent manage the projects.

The rise of agentic AI means hybrid human-digital workforces will become the norm. Digital employees will perform much of the routine work, while most human team members will be in management or value added roles.

Agentic AI presents tremendous opportunities for GCCs to be more productive, efficient, and agile – while contributing new technology solutions to the enterprise. For example, GCCs have already implemented AI-enabled chat bots that are common features on company websites. Now, enterprises are looking for agentic AI use cases – with three popular archetypes being search tools to access corporate knowledge, in software development life cycle, and workflow automation to handle routine customer service tasks such as checking account balances or order status.

But agentic AI also creates new challenges. GCCs will require new types of professionals such as AI persona designers, AI resource managers and AI validation professionals. They’ll have to train all staff in these new skills needed to be agentic AI-savvy. And they’ll need to manage change during what will be a significant transformation in the nature of work delivery.

For this reason, Capgemini’s client engagements typically involve technology solutions, change management programs, and business process transformations, tailored to industry-specific priorities and requirements. For greenfield GCCs, it’s important to design them from the outset as agentic AI-enabled assets. For existing GCCs, it’s essential to recognize that this transformation is imminent, and start planning – today – to embrace it.

The Capgemini advantage

As a global leader in cloud transformations, digital engineering, advanced analytics, and generative/agentic AI solutions, and talent development, Capgemini enables enterprises to leverage their GCCs to drive meaningful innovation, enhance agility, and deliver sustainable business impact. We leverage AI at three different levels – for accelerating the transformation of our enterprise customers’ business processes and operating models, towards improving the way we deliver IT and business process services to our customers and finally, in the transformation of our own internal enterprise functions to improve employee and stakeholder experience.

Capgemini has developed accelerators to enable enterprise AI adoption for software development life cycle, which is a core part of most GCCs today.

Capgemini applies future-focused strategies and technologies to help organizations transform GCCs from simple extensions of enterprise functions into strategic hubs that drive ongoing innovation at scale and enhance global competitiveness.

Please contact me if you would like to discuss this further.