What Happens to GCC Talent When AI Takes Over the Routine? | Anneka Darashah | Head – People Advisory | MOAR Advisory

Over the last decade, India’s GCCs stopped being execution centres; they shifted to being centres where global companies handed talent real ownership, decision rights, escalation authority, exposure to complex problems and encouraged cross-border solutioning, years earlier than most of the market was prepared to. That shift shows up in a metric CHROs watch closely among other data: attrition. GCCs hold attrition at 12–14%, structurally lower than IT services’ 13–16% and well below India Inc.’s ~17%. Talent stay because the work is theirs, not because its comfortable or routine.

The real question is much sharper here: if GCCs have already expanded ownership for their people, what happens when AI takes over the routine work that used to be the entry point into that ownership?

This is where the conversation needs to move. Tech talent employment has already fallen nearly 20% as AI absorbs rules-based, entry-level work, and entry-level attrition was already the highest point in the pipeline before this started. That is the load-bearing wall of the GCC talent model. For two decades, the way GCC professionals earned trust to make decisions was by first doing the routine work reliably. AI hasn’t removed the ownership GCCs built, but it has removed the traditional path people used to walk to get there. The advantage still exists, the staircase up to it just changed shape.

I’d push back on treating this purely as a threat. The instinct in some organisations, when cost pressure meets new automation capability, is to cut first and figure out the rest later. The data on that instinct is fairly revealing: 55% of executives who cut staff in anticipation of AI gains later regretted it, and 29% of companies that made AI-driven cuts have already rehired. Judgment, escalation-handling, and client trust don’t disappear just because the tasks around them get automated. No matter how far automation goes, human judgment in the loop remains non-negotiable.

The opportunity in front of GCC leaders is about whether talent development can keep pace with how the work itself is changing. The World Economic Forum expects 39% of core skills to be transformed by 2030. Right now, only 16% of workers show high AI readiness, projected to reach just 25% next year. That gap, between how fast the work is shifting and how fast people are being equipped to shift with it, is where I’d tell a CHRO to focus.

What I’d actually build

When clients ask how to respond, I tell them the same thing: this is beyond a single decision, this is a workforce architecture, needing three levers working together, not one substituting for the others.

• Build. Continuous reskilling as a default operating rhythm, not an annual training calendar item.
• Borrow. Academic partnerships and gig or specialist talent pools exist for surge capacity you don’t need to own permanently.
• Automate. This lever gets all the attention, rightly so, but it should be sized correctly. Automation frees capacity; it doesn’t replace workforce strategy.

The leaders who get this right will be the ones who use automation to buy back time, then reinvest it in building judgment earlier in people’s careers than the old model allowed.

The longer story

Here’s what I find genuinely encouraging: India’s GCCs already know how to do this. Global leadership roles originating from GCCs have grown at roughly 40% CAGR to reach 6,500+ in 2024, projected to cross 30,000 by 2030. That is the real evidence of workforce already trusted to lead, at scale, faster than most markets believed possible.

The GCC talent model was never about doing routine work well. It was about how quickly ownership got handed over once people proved they could handle it. AI is compressing that runway. For CHROs and people leaders, the decision has moved from how many entry-level roles survive the next few years, to whether they build the judgment, mentorship, and career architecture needed to hand over ownership earlier to a generation that will spend far less time on routine work and far more on the work that built India’s advantage..