For years, Global Capability Centres were the quiet back rooms of multinationals, built to handle technology support, finance processes or research work at a distance from headquarters. In 2026, that description no longer fits. In India alone, GCCs are projected to have generated about $98.4 billion in revenue in FY26, with 2,117 centres and a talent base of 2.36 million, numbers that are already brushing up against forecasts once reserved for 2030. What has changed is not just scale but mandate. A growing share of marketing, content, retail media, loyalty, design and campaign operations is now being done inside these centres. For a large and fast-growing slice of brand work, GCCs are beginning to look a lot like the new agencies.
Officially, a GCC is an offshore unit set up by a company to deliver services for its parent organisation. In practice, the model has evolved much further than that. India’s government now describes GCCs as having moved from basic support desks to “innovation powerhouses” driving research, design and development, while ACCA notes that the shift accelerated after 2013 and was then catalysed by the pandemic, which proved that remote and distributed work could support core enterprise functions. The old captive centre was about efficiency. The newer GCC is about owning business-critical work inside a global operating model, with teams integrated into the parent company rather than sitting outside it as vendors.
That evolution matters because brand building itself has changed. Marketing is now less a sequence of big campaign moments and more an always-on machine of audience signals, campaign adaptation, commerce content, loyalty nudges, retail media, search, email, social and performance creative. A recent study of major advertisers found that 82% now operate an in-house agency of some kind. GCCs are the globalised version of that instinct. EY says India-based retail and consumer goods GCCs are increasingly managing market research, campaign execution and content creation end to end, covering 3D imaging, static creatives, email campaigns, social media and loyalty marketing. A 2025 retail study goes further, saying marketing work “previously managed by agencies” is now increasingly being handled in-house within GCCs.
The comparison with traditional agencies is sharpest on control, speed and workflow. A GCC gives a brand tighter ownership of its data, tools, approvals and institutional memory. It can put analysts, engineers, media operators and designers on the same stack, working to the same governance. That is powerful when the task is personalisation at scale or campaign tweaking in near real time. It also changes the cost equation. ACCA notes that GCC roles now often pay 12% to 20% more than comparable roles in IT services and non-tech firms, which is a reminder that this is no longer only about cheap labour. The newer prize is talent concentration, speed and reuse of data and assets. Agencies still offer what a captive team may struggle to create for itself, namely outside perspective, cross-category pattern recognition and a willingness to challenge the client. But on operational marketing, the centre of gravity is moving inward.
The clearest evidence comes from brands that now talk publicly about these centres as part of the growth engine. At Lowe’s India, marketing is listed alongside merchandising, analytics and supply chain as a core capability. The retailer’s India hub, based in Bengaluru, has, according to a 2025 retail GCC study, a marketing team of more than 100 people handling 3D imaging, static content, email campaigns, social media management and loyalty marketing. The same study says the centre incubated and helped monetise the retailer’s media network, which has become one of its fastest-growing revenue channels. That is not an old-style captive. It is an in-house agency married to ad tech, analytics and commerce.
At Target, the language is even blunter. Andrea Zimmerman, president of Target in India, told The Hindu that the Bengaluru operation sees itself as the retailer’s “second headquarters”. She said roughly 5,000 team members in India work across marketing, merchandising, digital, data sciences, finance and supply chain, and that India teams contributed to key elements of the retailer’s revamped loyalty programme, including user interface, personalised offers and marketing initiatives. Current official job listings in Bengaluru include copywriter and art director roles, alongside ad-tech and product-content jobs. In other words, the same centre that helps run the retail machine is also shaping how the brand is written, designed, targeted and monetised.
McDonald’s is making a similar bet from Hyderabad. Its official careers material says the city’s new global office is designed to expand the company’s global talent base and “in-house expertise”, bringing together knowledge across business, technology, analytics and AI. That is already visible in the roles being hired there. One current posting is for a manager in global restaurant design, covering customer-facing spaces, design strategy, corporate design and brand extensions. Separately, the company has said India will be a key hub for the data governance, engineering and platform architecture underpinning its AI push. The point is telling: in modern brand organisations, experience design, operational design and marketing infrastructure increasingly sit in the same room.
There are quieter examples too. Official openings from PepsiCo in Hyderabad include social media analytics, consumer and shopper insight, marketing, media execution and digital commerce roles. One listing for media execution and operations explicitly covers performance campaigns across retailer platforms and PepsiCo brands. That is work many marketers once handed to a specialist agency or platform partner. Inside a GCC, however, it can sit alongside commerce data, AI tools and consumer insight teams, cutting down handoffs and keeping learning inside the company walls. For global brands under pressure to move faster, that is a compelling proposition.
Yet the strongest argument for nuance comes from HEINEKEN, because the brewer has made both moves at once. When it opened its India business services centre in April, CFO Harold van den Broek called it part of a push towards “more efficient and digitally enabled ways of working”, while senior director Ákos Magyari said Hyderabad offered “deep expertise in digital, AI and business services”. Days later, the company announced a reworked global marketing roster covering creative, production and media partners. Jorn Socquet, its senior director for brand impact and growth transformation, said the new agency model should deliver “greater speed and efficiency” and more impactful creativity. That juxtaposition is the story in miniature. Brands are not simply replacing agencies. They are redrawing the line between what stays inside and what still needs outside help.
The forces behind the shift are structural. India’s government says the country contributes 28% of the global STEM workforce and 23% of global software engineering talent. EY says 83% of India-based GCCs are already investing in GenAI, 58% are investing in agentic AI, 81% are upskilling internal teams on GenAI and more than half already hold shared accountability for global decisions. ACCA argues that Covid-era remote work proved the model could scale beyond support processes, helping turn GCCs into true digital hubs. When marketing becomes a system built on first-party data, machine learning, cloud workflows and 24-hour collaboration across time zones, the logic of keeping more of it inside the enterprise grows stronger by the quarter.
The market momentum is hard to miss. JLL says GCCs accounted for a record 38% of office leasing across India’s top seven cities in 2025, taking 31.3 million square feet. More than 100 new GCCs were added or expanded in FY26 alone. Consultant Lalit Ahuja has argued that the next phase is “10 times the IT opportunity”, because the point is no longer just to support core business but to do it. The result is that brand, product, analytics and design work are no longer protected territories reserved for headquarters or agency hubs in London, New York or Chicago. They are increasingly mobile enterprise functions, and GCCs are where that mobility is being organised.
Still, there are real limits, and this is where the agency obituary goes too far. Creativity does not scale as neatly as content production. Centralised teams can become brilliant at optimisation and weak at provocation. Recent reporting on the shift of marketing intelligence to India has pointed to two constraints in particular: data residency rules and the need for local cultural intuition. India’s DPDP Rules were notified in November 2025, while the Reserve Bank of India continues to require payment system data to be stored only in India. EY says the next wave of GCC growth will also require stronger IP protection and faster approvals, and WPP warns in its own filings that where AI is used in client deliverables, copyright risk must be assessed against the underlying data. The operational upside is real, but so are governance, compliance and brand-risk questions.
For agencies, the implication is not extinction but compression and reinvention. The repeatable layers of marketing, especially content versioning, performance creative, retail media operations, search, email, testing and measurement, are increasingly suited to GCCs or hybrid client teams. Agencies are responding by selling fewer labour hours and more systems, intelligence and senior strategic judgment. WPP’s latest push is a good example: the company now offers an AI platform that lets brands plan, create and publish campaigns directly, and chief executive Cindy Rose has called that move “transforming how marketing is delivered”. At the same time, the group keeps insisting that strategic and creative partnership remains essential for the biggest and most complex brands. That is probably the right read of the market. What is being automated or internalised is not all agency value, only the part that became process.
So, are GCCs becoming the new agencies for global brands? In part, yes. For the data-rich, always-on, repeatable and measurable parts of modern marketing, many GCCs already function as internal agencies, content studios, media operations hubs and analytics nerve centres rolled into one. But they are not replacing agencies outright. The more interesting development is that they are becoming the permanent internal counterpart to them. Brands now want the engine room in-house and the boldest creative leap, the uncomfortable outside challenge and the culturally sensitive call from a partner they do not own. The future, then, is not GCC versus agency. It is a hybrid model in which the GCC owns the machine, and the agency is brought in for the moments when a machine is not enough.
Disclaimer: All data points and statistics are attributed to published research studies and verified market research. All quotes are either sourced directly or attributed to public statements.
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