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When Costco recently announced plans to set up a Global Capability Center (GCC) in India, it added its name to a growing list of global brands investing in dedicated operations to manage marketing, martech, and media functions from the subcontinent. From consumer goods giants and ecommerce platforms to global agency networks and entertainment studios, India is increasingly being positioned not just as an execution base, but as a strategic marketing innovation hub.
As of July 2025, between 1500 and 1700 GCCs are active across India, according to industry estimates. While IT and financial services continue to dominate the landscape, a growing number of these centers now focus specifically on marketing, content, and advertising technology, particularly within the media and entertainment ecosystem, where 50 to 60 GCCs are already operational.
Unlike the BPO wave of the early 2000s, today’s GCCs are embedded in core business functions. “It’s no longer just IT or back-office work,” says Vinay Sarawagi, Founder of The Media GCC, an organisation that helps midsized global media companies set up agile operations in India. “These are full spectrum operations, embedded across industries, and marketing is a major driver.”
Strategy meets scale
What’s changed? Cost still plays a role, but other factors are equally important. “When you are talking about India and GCCs, we can't skip the cost factor. That’s central,” says Rahul Vengalil, Co-founder and CEO of tgthr. “But the real story is our adaptability. We speak English, we work across time zones, and we adapt faster than any
other country to global tech trends.”
This agility has turned India into a global hub for MarTech execution and innovation. Gopa Menon, Co-founder and COO of Theblurr, believes India’s edge lies in how Martech professionals here think and build. “The real differentiator isn’t just engineering talent,” he says. “It’s the convergence of technical depth with marketing intuition.”
Menon adds that Indian teams have built scalable marketing solutions by first solving for the complexity of the Indian market, including multilingual audiences, fragmented digital maturity, and privacy regulations. “They’re building attribution models for cookie-less environments, integrating legacy systems with modern stacks, and creating personalization engines that work across vastly different market conditions,” he explains. “This kind of experience is incredibly valuable for global GCCs.”
Full-stack evolution
For Sarawagi, India’s advantage lies in four core areas, which he refers to as the ‘4 T’s’: Talent, Technology, Trust, and Tools. “It all starts with talent. India offers a young, skilled, and creative workforce,” he says. “But trust is equally important. When companies offshore high-value, IP-intensive work, they need confidence in how it will be handled. That’s why governance, cultural alignment, and workflow discipline matter so much.”
There are currently close to two million professionals working in Indian GCCs, points out Sarawagi, with many of them in AI-powered content, CRM, and media operations roles. As marketing becomes more reliant on data and automation, GCCs are helping global brands build and scale new capabilities.
“Today’s GCCs are not just tech shops,” says Vibhor Mehrotra, Managing Partner at Innocean India. “They’re hybrid hubs where performance marketers, creative technologists, and engineers work together. We’ve reached a point where a UX designer in Bangalore could be optimising a customer journey for a US retail brand, while an AI engineer down the hall builds the personalization logic behind it.”
This ability to bring strategy and execution together is what sets India’s GCC model apart. Mehrotra adds, “The maturity of Indian teams has grown rapidly. They’re no longer adapting to global stacks. They’re contributing to how those stacks evolve.”
Sarawagi sees a growing opportunity particularly for mid-sized media and entertainment companies based in the US and Europe, typically those with revenues between $100 million and $700 million.
These companies may not need large, fully captive GCCs. Instead, they often prefer models like Build-OperateTransfer or company-partner-operated setups,” he says. “We work closely with such clients to build their presence in India in a phased and strategic way. These companies don’t need a 5000-seat GCC. They need a 50 to 200-seat setup.”
Menon agrees that the speed and responsiveness of Indian teams are what make them valuable beyond scale. “The rapid prototyping culture here means teams can go from concept to working product in weeks, not months,” he says. “And because they’ve grown up solving for constraints, they’re often better at building creative, compliant, and resource-light solutions.”
This applies across platforms and use cases. India now has a deep bench of professionals certified in Salesforce Marketing Cloud, Adobe Experience Platform, Oracle Eloqua, and other MarTech tools. Many GCCs are building AI-powered modules on top of these platforms, from recommendation engines to media mix modeling systems.
Vengalil believes the rise of Indian GCCs is also closely linked to broader shifts in the global talent market. “We’re generating more engineers than any other country,” he says. “And because they’re working on the latest platforms from early in their careers, they’re able to deliver global-standard work faster and more efficiently.”
A necessary pivot
For many global companies, setting up a GCC in India is no longer just a strategic decision. It’s increasingly a necessity.
Sarawagi shares a recent anecdote that illustrates the global talent gap. “A European media company we work with had been trying for over a quarter to hire AI-skilled roles locally,” he recalls. “They used headhunters and job platforms, but either couldn’t find the talent or couldn’t afford it. Their shift to India wasn’t just strategic — it became necessary.”
While the ecosystem continues to mature, Sarawagi points out that much of the activity remains concentrated in cities like Bangalore and Hyderabad, with states like Telangana offering proactive support. “Northern and Eastern India, despite having strong talent pools, are still catching up in terms of infrastructure and support systems,” he notes.
Looking ahead, all four experts agree that India will play a central role in the future of global media and marketing operations. Not just as a delivery center, but as a source of innovation, speed, and strategic talent.
As AI and automation continue to reshape global media and marketing, Sarawagi believes Indian talent will play a larger role. “For media and entertainment companies, especially mid-sized ones, there is a real opportunity to revisit their operating models,” he says. “The GCC model in India offers both cost efficiency and access to highquality talent — which can help them invest in their future.”
With more companies following in Costco’s footsteps, the future of marketing and media may be built in India, not just for India, but for the world.
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