BENGALURU, May 18 - Global capability centres in India are proceeding more cautiously on recruitment as firms weigh geopolitical uncertainty and the potential impact of artificial intelligence on staffing needs, said Lalit Ahuja, founder and chief executive of ANSR, a firm that assists companies in building and operating such centres.
India currently hosts more than half of the world’s global centres, a position companies prize for the country’s large skilled labour pool, lower operating costs and increasing capacity to support higher-value work in technology, finance and engineering. Yet Ahuja warned that the rise of AI is starting to challenge that advantage by potentially reducing headcount in certain roles and altering the mix of work performed in these centres.
"There is a sense of cautiousness," Ahuja said. "Companies are hiring fewer people, just as a matter of abundant caution."
ANSR, whose client roster includes FedEx, Target and Lowe’s, has observed material reductions in hiring plans. Ahuja said recruitment has been cut by roughly 30% to 50% in some instances, and some organisations that had envisioned centres staffed with more than 5,000 employees have scaled back those plans to about 2,000. He did not provide more granular detail on which companies or locations were affected.
A recent industry projection cited in a report by Nasscom and consultancy Zinnov anticipates that India will have close to 2,200 global centres and a talent base of about 2.36 million by the end of the fiscal year that concludes in March.
With hiring likely to remain muted in the near term, Ahuja said growth will increasingly come from new entrants establishing operations in India. He described a staffing model in which companies maintain a smaller core workforce while supplementing that core with a larger, flexible pool of workers who can be scaled up or down in response to business needs.
This approach reflects what Ahuja characterised as growing impatience with a pure "wait-and-watch" stance. Instead of executing full-scale hiring drives, firms are launching operations on a reduced scale and treating the arrangements as experiments they can expand later if conditions warrant.
"Companies are now undertaking bold experiments," Ahuja said. "You can always hire more, but it’s always difficult to let go of people."
The shifts in hiring strategy intersect with broader questions about the future composition of work in global centres as organisations adapt to automation and AI tools. At the same time, firms remain attentive to geopolitical dynamics that are contributing to caution around recruitment and investment timing.
Separately, some market-facing material referenced in the original reporting highlighted the role of data and analytical tools in investment decision-making, noting that institutional-grade data and AI-powered analysis can inform portfolio choices. That commentary framed tools as aids for investors seeking to reduce gatekeeping errors rooted in intuition, while acknowledging no guarantee of investment success.