By: Kavita Wakade, Director–Manufacturing

How do businesses transform to stay relevant in an era of relentless innovation and hyper-charged competition? For many, the answer lies in adopting specialized Global Capability Centers (GCCs) configured to their industry’s challenges. Whether addressing complex supply chains, innovation cycles, or customer expectations, GCCs offer more than operational support; they provide a blueprint for the resilience and growth of an enterprise. This blog will take you through the ‘why’ behind the rising importance of GCCs, the necessity behind industry-specific GCCs, and how they unlock new potential in a constantly changing world.

Organizations today are actively looking for strategic partners who provide:

• Talented workforce with specialized skill sets across the industry value chain
• Expertise in industry and technology to drive innovation and productivity
• Industry-specific solutions to drive enterprise-wide transformation
• Cost-efficiencies to simplify operations and add value enterprise-wide

The growing need for industry-focused GCCs

Organizations no longer accept a one-size-fits-all approach—rather, they are looking to partner with organizations that can strategically and seamlessly integrate overall operations. They require domain expertise and innovation to meet their specific needs beyond arbitrage of cost:

• Industry-specific process standardization: Specialized process frameworks—like lean manufacturing for industries or agile compliance workflows for BFSI—streamlining operations and reducing inefficiencies unique to each sector.
• Domain-aligned talent hubs: Global talent pools with specialized expertise, such as embedded systems engineers for automotive, regulatory analysts for healthcare, or AI modelers for retail. This ensures expert capabilities are available where needed most.
• Strategic control with industry depth: Gain tighter control over IP, compliance, and operational priorities—whether pharma-grade data security or precision engineering standards in aerospace.
• Scalable, resilient ecosystems: Solutions like omnichannel retail platforms or smart factory systems offer the agility needed to scale effectively. It is equally essential to ensure an ecosystem that aligns with geographic diversity to mitigate risks tied to sector-specific regulations or supply chain disruptions.

How are industry-focused solutions influencing the setup of capability centres?

Setting up industry-focused GCCs to offer efficient services as well as strategic value services can be the solutions to meet this pressing demand. In manufacturing, healthcare, finance, or retail, GCCs are ready to offer solutions that are designed to cater to the unique challenges of the various sectors.

The concept of industry-focused solutions in this context refers to the growth and calibration of the GCC offerings for specific industries. Moving away from the generic solution approach, GCCs are employed to develop industry-focused structures, frameworks, processes, and expertise addressing the specific needs of industries. For example, a GCC solution for an escalator and elevator manufacturer would focus on creating niche analytical tools to remotely manage and control the elevator functions. On the other hand, a financial services organization would have their focus on developing robust regulatory compliance systems or fraud prevention frameworks.

Evolutionary technology, like agentic AI, allows GCCs aligned with specific industries to craft bespoke solutions for their functions. This ensures improved agility and strategic value in their operations. Among other features, agentic AI enables optimizing workflows, automating decision-making, and surfacing insights through such intelligent behaviour. Agentic AI understands the nuances of the work domain, regardless of whether it is a manufacturing, BFSI, or healthcare sector.

In functional areas such as program management or compliance, it can support intelligent orchestration of this type of work, predictive mitigation of risks, and situationally relevant reporting. Such sector-conscious intelligence assists GCCs in developing into a part of innovation rather than support hubs. These hubs are transformational through scalable, flexible, and context-specific AI capabilities to fit enterprise objectives and local implementation requirements. This industry-focused approach means that the GCCs will not just be service provider centres but will be partners with the capability of facilitating industry-specific innovations.

In my journey across GCCs, I have witnessed a clear shift from generic IT services to deep industry alignment. For instance, a global industrial manufacturing leader has been focused on hiring talent with deep knowledge of automation systems, industrial IoT, and factory floor integration, prioritizing domain expertise over generalist development skills. Similarly, in the automotive sector, one of the major OEMs explicitly sought professionals with domain expertise who understand vehicle platforms, diagnostics, and compliance, not just traditional IT skills. These examples underscore how GCCs evolve into strategic hubs that demand contextual knowledge to co-create value with business units, rather than functioning as back-office support.

Industry examples of GCC customization

The nuances of industry-focused GCCs vary depending on the sector, as each industry has its own regulatory environment, customer expectations, technological demands, and competitive pressures. Let’s explore how GCCs are making a difference to some of these sectors.

Industrial manufacturing

• Industry 4.0 and smart manufacturing: Implement industry 4.0 principles, including automation, robotics, AI, and machine learning to optimize production lines, reduce costs, and improve product quality. Further, enhanced smart manufacturing is achieved using agentic AI with learning through machine performance patterns, autonomous workflow orchestration, and maintenance schedules recommendations, using real-time data.
• Supply chain resilience: Deploy resilient, efficient, cost-effective, yet complex supply chains.
• Predictive maintenance: Adopt predictive maintenance solutions to reduce downtime and extend the life cycle of machinery through IoT sensors, big data analytics, and AI algorithms.
• Sustainability: Improve sustainability by reducing waste, improving resource efficiency, and meeting environmental regulations through sustainable manufacturing processes.

Automotive

• Supply chain optimization: Implement streamlined, globalized supply chain setup through technologies such as AI and Internet of Things (IoT), to ensure cost-effective production and distribution.
• Electric and autonomous vehicles: Drive focused research and development activities related to battery technology, electric drive trains, and sensor technologies for self-driving cars.
• Sustainability and green technologies: Integrate green technologies such as Gen-AI driven design and manufacturing of energy-efficient solutions – reducing carbon emissions and promote sustainable manufacturing.
• Aftermarket services: Improve efficiency and customer experience in the areas of after-sales services such as maintenance, repair, and spare parts.

Healthcare and life sciences

• Regulatory compliance: Make sure they comply with regulations such as Food and Drug Administration (FDA) licensing and approvals, Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) compliance in the case of the U.S., and other international standards on product development, clinical trials, and management of patient data.
• Innovation in drug development and medical devices: Utilize R&D departments that have expertise in biotechnology and feel a commitment to drug development, management of clinical trials, and creation of medical equipment or digital health technologies in drugs.
• Personalized medicine and genomics: Provide increased emphasis on data analytics and artificial intelligence (AI) to achieve genomics, diagnostic, and treatment planning to create personalized medicine.
• Collaboration with healthcare institutions: Partnering with hospitals, research, and medical universities with the purpose of catalysing innovation to address the challenges of the healthcare environment.

Financial services

• Fintech Innovation: Promote fintech, such as blockchain, online payments, cryptocurrencies, robo-advisor-based financial services, and online peer-to-peer lending platforms.
• Advanced analytics for fraud prevention: Use big data, machine learning, and AI to identify fraud, determine credit risk, and enhance investment strategies. Agentic AI adds another layer by applying contextual learning to spot anomalous patterns across diverse financial instruments, enabling proactive fraud detection and real-time risk scoring.
• Customer experience in banking: Enhance customer experience (CX) by minimizing friction when using digital services and providing streamlined customer assistance to mobile applications, custom financial guidance along with groundbreaking online banking products. This means simplifying digital transactions and ensuring smooth, consistent support experiences.

Retail and consumer goods

• E-commerce and digital transformation: Build e-channel channels, multichannel stores, customer interfaces, and digital capabilities (e.g., chatbots, and personal recommendations) to further drive the digital-first initiatives.
• Supply chain and inventory management: Optimize supply chain and control of inventory at the global level, predictive analytics to make sure the right product is in the right stock and delivered at the correct time.
• Customer experience (CX) and personalization: Personalize the customer experience by applying AI and machine learning to suggest and recommend products linked to the browsing and buying data, e.g., purchase history.
• Product innovation: Create new products that can accommodate the changing customer preferences, like sustainable or environmentally friendly products, or ones that are based on consumer trends (e.g., wellness-based products).

The road ahead

Establishing industry-driven GCCs is not only a temporary trend but is a transformative shift in the manner in which businesses operate. Industries are increasingly becoming specialized; therefore, services configured according to the client’s needs have become topical necessities. Hence, capability centres must adapt and address this demand and rely on in-depth domain expertise, sophisticated technologies, and innovative models and frameworks.

Agentic AI will play a pivotal role in this evolution, offering intelligent, adaptive, and industry-aware capabilities that enable GCCs to scale with agility while staying aligned with strategic business outcomes. Its ability to contextualize tasks, interpret sector-specific nuances, and deliver decision support makes it essential for next-generation GCC models.

However, this evolution comes with its own set of challenges:

1. GCCs must navigate issues like maintaining consistency while they offer tailor-made solutions, integrating the latest technologies
2. Not losing focus on creating a unique customer experience
3. Adapting to rapidly changing technical and industry dynamics while optimizing costs.

Conclusion

With more industries following the trend of specialization, GCCs can only gain more ground in the future based on their capability to provide value in designated sectors. Partners who become more than regular service providers and incorporate profound domain knowledge will be in a stronger position to address the requirements of transformation and set new standards.

The future of capability centres is tied to innovation and specialization. Industry-focused GCCs will remain critical for businesses navigating rapid innovation and disruption. Future advances, like the broader application of agentic AI, will only deepen their ability to deliver domain-specific expertise.

For enterprises, the mandate is clear: adopt GCCs that go beyond the typical models that are focused on operational efficiencies. Carefully select partners with profound industry knowledge who can help you innovate with industry-specific talent and harness the power of agentic AI. Businesses that invest in these specialized centers will gain a competitive edge and ensure resilience and adaptability in the face of uncertainty.