A consultancy that sets up engineering centers in India released its Talent Trends report on the country's global capability centers (GCCs). Hiring at those centers grew 12 to 15% year over year in the first half of 2026, ahead of the wider Indian technology sector. About 65% of new positions ask for AI skills. Two profiles are growing fastest, the AI-native engineer and the forward-deployed engineer, with postings for both up roughly tenfold. India has more than 1,900 such centers employing over 2.1 million people, a thousand of them in Bengaluru. The line to keep, from the firm's talent chief Monica Jamwal: a decisive shift from hiring for scale to hiring for capability.
I helped stand up a team in Bangalore, and the report describes a change many US managers have not caught up with. The old model of an India center was scale: a large team doing well-defined work at a cost advantage, managed from the home office. That is the model the tools erode fastest, because well-defined work is what they do.
What is being hired instead is capability: people who own a problem, talk to the business, and build things that had no specification. A center staffed that way cannot be run as a ticket queue from Atlanta. It has to be a team, with its own product relationships and decision rights.
Hire capability and manage for scale, and you lose the people you hired.
If you run a team in India, is it organized for the work it was hired for in 2019 or in 2026?
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