India, Oct 27: TeamLease Digital, a specialised talent solutions firm in India, today announced new findings on Global Capability Centres (GCCs) in India. The findings show that GCCs are steadily moving from delivery centres to AI capability hubs, and the pay for digital talent is moving along with them. The salary findings are based on TeamLease Digital's analysis of 37,000 tech and digital roles.
The scale of the opportunity is already significant. India has 2,117 active GCCs, employing 23.6 lakh highly skilled professionals and contributing $98.4 billion in annual revenue. What stands out, however, is the change in what these centres do. 44% of GCCs have now reached the Portfolio Hub or Transformation stage, where they increasingly own platforms, products, AI adoption and business-critical outcomes. AI is the engine behind this shift. India has 2.5 lakh+ AI/ML talent and 1,200+ AI-enabled GCCs, and ranks #1 in global AI hiring. 83% of GCCs are scaling GenAI, 70% are following a hybrid AI model and 58% are investing in agentic AI, which shows GCCs are no longer just executing for global enterprises but helping drive their transformation.
As GCCs take on more ownership, the talent they hire is being paid for it. The 2026 salary increment in GCCs stands at 10.4%, ahead of the 9.1% India Inc. average, and AI, ML, cyber and cloud skills carry a 30–40% pay premium because demand outpaces supply.
The AI Talent Landscape identified by TeamLease Digital shows that this premium is not spread evenly across roles. Depth is concentrated in AI-Core, roles that build and own intelligent systems, which appears in only two places: the AI family and AI risk governance. Breadth sits in AI-Adjacent roles, which apply AI within established workflows and span Data, Cloud and Cybersecurity. No AI-Support role appears at premium in a GCC, indicating that the routine layer is being repriced downward rather than upward.
The salary findings show that this divide begins at entry itself. For early and mid-career roles, at 0–2 years of experience, AI-Core roles earn a median fixed pay of ₹10.8 LPA to ₹13.2 LPA. AI-Adjacent roles earn ₹9.0 LPA to ₹10.2 LPA, while AI-Support roles earn ₹4.8 LPA (Data Quality Analyst) to ₹5.4 LPA. AI-Core roles therefore open 2.5–3× above AI-Support, and they are also projected to grow faster, at 16–21% against 7–8%.
The gap keeps widening with experience and is widest at the top, where architecture sets the ceiling. At 15+ years, AI-Core roles earn ₹92.8 LPA (Principal Data Scientist) to ₹108.6 LPA (AI Architect). AI-Adjacent roles earn ₹86.4 LPA (Data Architect) to ₹98.6 LPA (Cloud Security Architect), while AI-Support roles earn ₹36.8 LPA (Data Operations Manager) to ₹79.8 LPA (Finops Manager). AI Architect, Lead GenAI Engineer and Cloud Security Architect roles reach ₹97–109 LPA, roughly 2–3× senior AI-Support roles, and are still growing at 19–21%.
The findings also point to where salary growth is headed in FY27-28. GenAI, ML and data science remain the highest-return skilling pathways for salary acceleration in GCCs. Skills in LLMs, RAG, and prompt engineering, are projected to grow 20.5% in FY27–28, followed by ML skills such as PyTorch, TensorFlow and model deployment at 18.7%. At senior levels, LLM architecture, RAG at scale, and agentic AI lead at 20.8%, followed by AI architecture, MLOps, GenAI strategy and model governance at 19.6%.
Commenting on the findings, Neeti Sharma, CEO, TeamLease Digital said
“The GCC story in India is no longer about where work gets done. It is about who shapes what global enterprises build next. As these centres take on the thinking, ownership and accountability behind AI, India is becoming central to how enterprises across the world transform. The next phase of GCC growth will be led less by scale of headcount and more by judgment, governance and the ability to turn AI into business outcomes. The task for India now is to build talent at that depth, so that GCCs remain not just an execution hub for global enterprises, but a source of their innovation and strategic capability.”
