Global capability centres in India are increasingly using artificial intelligence as a tool to automate repetitive work and to prototype broader operational changes across multinational firms. Executives at several GCCs said AI is being applied in areas as diverse as marketing, content creation, finance, hiring and clinical support to reduce time-consuming manual tasks and to enable new business processes.
In the healthcare sector, Apollo Hospitals has implemented an AI clinical assistant created in partnership with Microsoft that speeds up the collection of patient information and the production of clinical insights. Puneet Chandok, president of Microsoft India and South Asia, highlighted the effect on clinical workflows, saying: "That is 20% time given back to doctors. That is 20% time back to patients."
Retail and branded consumer goods teams operating out of Indian GCCs are also experimenting with AI-driven production techniques. At Catalyst Brands' Bengaluru centre - the back-end organisation for owner of the U.S. department store chain J.C.Penney - engineers are piloting computer-generated imagery to produce product visuals and video. Nihar Nidhi, India managing director at Catalyst, suggested such tools could cut the need to transport inventory to overseas photo shoots and said Bengaluru is "at the nose of the rocket" in piloting these prototypes.
Kimberly-Clark, the maker of Huggies diapers, is applying AI inside its marketing teams to accelerate campaign processes. The company has rolled out an internal tool that helps identify and evaluate social media influencers, a capability aimed at expanding reach and streamlining influencer selection.
Drugmakers are pushing AI into critical parts of the development and launch pipeline. Denmark’s Novo Nordisk is deploying AI across parts of the drug launch process, including drafting regulatory documentation, analysing safety data and supporting commercial analytics. The article notes that other pharmaceutical companies - including Amgen and AstraZeneca - are using AI to identify trial participants more quickly and to shorten the time needed to produce drug safety reports, a change that could save significant sums in the development cycle.
Technology and enterprise software businesses with GCC operations in India are similarly retooling processes. IBM India engineers have collaborated with a local college and municipal authorities to implement AI-enabled air-quality monitoring systems. IBM is also working with government bodies to explore wider AI adoption and to assist upskilling initiatives.
Workday India is building AI capabilities for payroll, hiring and finance, working closely with global teams to develop tools that operate across the enterprise. Sunil Jose, president of Workday India, described a shift in how the company approaches development - moving from assembling isolated modules to collaborating on comprehensive models. He said: "For us, it’s no more about saying - hey, we’re part of that rubric where we’ll build a few modules in the Lego module. It’s about building the entire model together."
The examples span multiple parts of corporate operations - from marketing and content generation that reduce logistics and creative costs, to clinical and regulatory applications that speed medical workflows and reporting. Across these deployments, GCCs are positioning AI not simply as a tool for isolated automation, but as an engine for broader innovation within the multinational organisations they support.
Sector implications - The adoption of AI in GCCs affects retail and consumer-packaged goods through automated content and influencer selection; healthcare and pharmaceuticals through clinical assistance and regulatory drafting; and enterprise software and government through monitoring, upskilling and finance/human-resources automation.