Why GCCs must use AI to drive reinvention

Global capability centres or GCCs is one of India’s best stories right now. On these pages, we’ve written a lot about that – about how so many global corporations are looking to India for talent to digitally transform themselves, how the older GCCs that started off as backoffice operations are moving up the value chain, working on cutting-edge technologies to help the parent enterprise. Last week, we had a panel discussion that looked at why GCCs need to use AI to drive the reinvention of the enterprise. AI is so disruptive that GCCs that approach everything with an AI-first lens could become core to parent entities.

We did discuss how AI is enabling efficiencies of an order that could not be imagined earlier. Prabhu Palanisamy, head of Chevron one-year-old GCC in India called ENGINE (engineering and innovation excellence centre), noted how one of his teams delivered a GenAI solution in six weeks on a key workflow in the wells drilling area that resulted in significant value and one that is scalable across Chevron.

But a lot of our discussion was around why GCCs should use AI for the enterprises’ business growth. And that’s what’s essential, said Kanwar Singh, senior managing director, and global GCC market lead at Accenture in India. “AI will improve productivity, but at the end of the day, it has to be the driver of growth. It drives growth by enabling one to build products that are very business relevant. Existing GCCs that started as cost centres can leapfrog as business centres,” he said.

Akash Jain, India leader at construction and mining equipment maker Caterpillar’s digital arm, Cat Digital, said the company’s 1.5 million or so machines around the world are today connected through sensors (IoT), and Cat Digital has built a data fabric that brings together all of the data captured by the sensors, and is now building solutions to derive insights from this data. “When a dealer sells a machine to a customer, CAT Digital provides the dealer and their condition monitoring personnel proactive insights through ML tools, so that they can reach out proactively to their customers and say, look, you need to change your oil filter right away, otherwise there will be downtime. More recently, we have given our condition monitoring analysts (CMAs) an AI agent that proactively looks at all the insights emerging, and prioritise those that are urgent and inform dealers and customers on time,” he said. From a customer experience viewpoint, he said, the impact has been tremendous, because hundreds of insights are currently thrown on CMAs’ screens today, and it’s difficult humanly to identify which are the most urgent.

A lot of this AI and digital work is done at the India centre. Jain noted that in the last five years, while globally CAT Digital has grown 4 to 5 times, in India, it has grown close to 10 times, and is today close to 45% of CAT Digital.

Palanisamy said this kind of innovation is what ENGINE was set up for. “Within the first few months, we set up an AI accelerator. It’s less than a year, and we have several use cases that have been done, and some of them are already in the hands of business users, and driving value,” he said.

Chandra Balani, head of AWS Industries India, noted that the auto and manufacturing GCCs in India that AWS works with are talking about innovating on the connected car, improving autonomous driving scenarios using AI and GenAI, building the software-defined vehicle. “Across industries, this is what is happening using AI and GenAI, and it’s transforming the business and their customers,” he said.

BUSINESS MINDSET
Given that more and more GCCs are being established in India, does the country have enough talent to help all of those global enterprises transform? Everybody said talent was not an issue, but also emphasised the importance of transforming the mindsets of GCC leaders and employees from a technology one to a business one. Singh said a business mindset is essential to be able to think of the most appropriate AI use cases to work on. “In Accenture, we always say, you are never a technologist, you need to have deep industry knowledge,” he said.

Palanisamy said Chevron’s business people sit together with the digital professionals – often in the same room – to innovate on solutions. “We have people who have spent 20-plus years in oil & gas in our centre. They accelerate that business acumen. We also made sure that the digital technology professionals bring tech knowledge to our business teams, so that they can visualise how tech can bring value. The lines are blurring,” he said.

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