Bengaluru: A growing number of leaders from India-based global capability centres (GCCs) are making their way into the Fortune 500 C-suite, underscoring the rising strategic importance of these centres and the influence of their leadership.Recent examples include Kalyani Sekar, senior vice-president and chief data and AI officer at Verizon; Hari Vasudev, executive vice-president and CTO of Walmart US; Ambica Rajagopal, group chief data and AI officer at Michelin; Suresh Venkatarayalu, CTO of Honeywell; and Navneet Kapoor, executive vice-president at Maersk.Yet industry experts argue that focusing solely on C-suite appointments misses the bigger transformation underway.The more significant shift, they say, is the growing number of India-based leaders who are shaping enterprise strategy, leading global technology and AI programmes, and owning business outcomes while remaining based in the country.A growing cadre of GCC executives now hold enterprise-wide responsibilities that extend well beyond managing local operations. Leaders such as Sarv Saravanan, chief customer officer at Commvault; Sunil Gopinath, CEO of Albertsons Companies India; Hariharan Ganesan, vice-president, data analytics and reporting at Rolls-Royce; Ankur Mittal, senior vice-president, CTO and managing director of Lowe’s India; and Vijai Kishan, India site lead and head of India enterprise technology at Fidelity Investments, oversee global customer, engineering, data, technology and AI functions from India.As GCCs evolve from delivery centres into strategic hubs, leadership itself is becoming geographically distributed. The distinction between headquarters and offshore centres is steadily blurring, with India emerging as an important node for enterprise-wide decision-making.“Indian GCC leaders reaching Fortune 500 C-suites is noteworthy, but it’s not the truest measure of progress,” said Pari Natarajan, CEO of Zinnov.“The real indicator of maturity is operating model ownership. Do these centres shape enterprise AI strategy or execute someone else’s vision? Do they control AI budgets and governance? Do they drive technology decisions across the stack or remain confined to application layers?”Zinnov’s latest AI maturity study suggests that while GCCs have made significant progress, the transition from execution to ownership remains incomplete. Nearly 87% of GCCs continue to operate primarily in execution mode. Only one-third have dedicated AI leadership, two-thirds lack deep domain expertise, and just 19% own end-to-end AI mandates.“The pattern isn’t variation in capability. It’s systematic constraint in the operating model,” Natarajan said. “We see pilots, hackathons and experiments everywhere. But innovation pipelines often break before they scale. Without mandate clarity, budget authority and deep domain grounding, GCC leaders remain brilliant executors in someone else’s strategy, not architects of transformation.”He believes senior corporate leadership appointments will naturally follow as GCCs move beyond execution to owning enterprise outcomes.Lalit Ahuja, founder of ANSR, believes the industry’s next phase is less about producing more Fortune 500 executives and more about redefining where global enterprises are led from. “The India GCC opportunity is not simply to produce more global executives. Rather, it is to redefine where global enterprises are led from,” he said.According to Ahuja, GCCs are increasingly functioning as second headquarters, making leadership location-agnostic. “The next chapter will not be defined by how many GCC leaders become Fortune 500 C-suite executives, but by how many global business, technology, product, operations and AI leaders choose to lead the enterprise from India.”He argues that the real marker of maturity is decision-making authority.“When strategy is conceived, products are built, capital is allocated and enterprise transformation is led from India, the distinction between headquarters and GCC becomes increasingly irrelevant. The future is not exporting leaders from India. It is bringing global leadership to India.”Manoj Marwah, GCC markets leader at EY India, echoed the view that enterprise influence matters more than job titles. “Becoming a Fortune 500 CXO may not be the only, or even the primary, measure of the evolution of GCC leadership,” he said. Marwah noted that fewer than 15% of GCCs in India belong to companies with a meaningful domestic business presence, making the progress already achieved by India-based executives significant. Leadership first emerged in technology and operations because those were the earliest functions to move to India. As GCCs take on product ownership, AI strategy and enterprise-wide mandates, broader business leadership roles are expected to follow. “The real measure of success is when the India centre is viewed no differently from any other office of the company,” Marwah said. “That’s when you achieve true organisational equity.”
