Are GCCs and IT services allies or adversaries in India’s tech growth story?

In this episode of the State of the Economy Podcast, host Sanjana B is joined by a distinguished panel of industry leaders—Ajay Prabhu, President, Technology Services, Quest Global; Mamatha Madireddy, Managing Director and Head of HSBC India Global Service Centres & Chairperson, Nasscom GCC Council; Jitender Mohan, Business Unit Head, Travel & Hospitality, WNS; and Srikanth Srinivasan, Vice President and Head of Membership & Outreach, Nasscom—for an insightful deep dive into India’s evolving IT sector. Together, they explore the shifting landscape of Global Capability Centres (GCCs), the transformational impact of AI on Business Process Management (BPM), the rising strategic role of Engineering R&D (ER&D), and the policy-level catalysts needed to unlock further innovation and scale. Setting the tone, Srikanth Srinivasan emphasises the cooperative nature of the ecosystem: “GCC’s and IT services companies, nobody’s posing a threat to anybody. It’s a very symbiotic relationship. It is a relationship of 1 + 1 is greater than two.” Mamatha Madireddy elaborates on the evolution of GCCs, observing: “Now GCC’s have moved away from being this traditional back-office operations to now GCC’s are centers of innovation. They are centres of research and centres of development.” On the engineering side, Ajay Prabhu highlights how India is gaining global recognition: “It just puts you on the engineering map of the world, brings that kind of credibility because engineering is very core.” Meanwhile, addressing the buzz around AI in BPM, Jitender Mohan reflects on the narrative shift: “Will AI eat BPM for breakfast? That’s where the joke started... But today, we are truly able to create transformation solutions and value differentiation offerings.” Host:Sanjana B; Producer: Siddharth Mathew About the State of the Economy podcast  India’s economy has been hailed as a bright spot amid the general gloom that seems to have enveloped the rest of the world. But several sectors continue to stutter even as others seem set to fire on all cylinders.