Only 8% GCCs made major gains in innovation, market edge, efficiency: BCG

Only 8 per cent of Global Capability Centres (GCCs) have advanced significantly across the three dimensions key to enterprise value innovation, competitive differentiation and operational efficiency, a new report from Boston Consulting Group (BCG) said.

India, the US, and Mexico emerged as the most balanced GCC ecosystems, with India uniquely combining scale, innovation, and efficiency, it said.

The report called for a step-change in how organisations structure, invest in, and activate their GCCs, not just as support engines, but as core drivers of innovation, AI adoption, and business outcomes.

While GCCs are evolving rapidly in scope and ambition, the majority remain focused on delivery execution, under-utilising their potential to act as capability hubs powering enterprise-wide transformation.

"A new report from Boston Consulting Group (BCG), 'Rewriting the Global Capability Center Playbook: Scaling Maturity with AI', finds that only 8 per cent of GCCs have advanced significantly across the three dimensions most critical to enterprise value innovation, competitive differentiation, and operational efficiency," it said.

The report found that tech, media, and telecom firms lead in maturity, driven by higher investment in AI initiatives and depth of innovation  It underlined AI, advanced AI use cases, including GenAI, and AI agents, as critical accelerator of GCC maturity.

While top performers have moved beyond pilots to embed AI across core workflows, most GCCs remain trapped in early-stage experimentation, it said.

"GCCs which treat AI as a bolt-on will never close the gap," Rajiv Gupta, Managing Director and Senior Partner at BCG, said.

The frontrunners have strategically embedded AI into their operating models, at a scale which makes a material difference at the enterprise level. The leaders are not experimenting, they are delivering meaningful outcomes.

Over 90 per cent of top-performing GCCs implement advanced AI use cases versus about 50 per cent of others.

"The risk for others is falling into an autopilot mode," Gupta added.