21SEP

India's GCCs absorb the offshored work

3 min read

16:45UTC

NASSCOM named JPMorgan, Goldman Sachs and Apple among firms expanding in-house India offices even as they cut at home, a relocation channel no US AI disclosure law or federal dataset can see.

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EconomicDeveloping

Key takeaway

A job that moves from New York to Bengaluru inside one company never registers as a US AI layoff.

NASSCOM, India's IT industry body, reported the sector added roughly 140,000 staff in the 2026 financial year to reach about 5.9 million, naming JPMorgan, Goldman Sachs, Apple, Walmart and Shell among firms expanding Global Capability Centres (GCCs) in Bengaluru, Hyderabad and Pune.⁠¹ Several of those firms are confirming AI-driven cuts at home in the same period. Entry-level IT hiring fell 20% to 25%, so the door into the industry is narrowing as the industry expands.⁠²

A GCC is an in-house offshore office, not an outsourcing contract, so when a multinational moves work to one it stays inside the same corporate entity. That distinction is the whole story. The job never appears as a US layoff cause and never shows up as an outsourcing deal either. Goldman Sachs has modelled AI substituting 25,000 US jobs a month while building these centres; JPMorgan's Jamie Dimon told investors the bank displaced staff through AI and is retraining them. The same headcount decision reads domestically as AI efficiency and offshore as capability investment.

The channel sits in a measurement blind spot by construction. A role moved from New York to Bengaluru triggers no WARN Act (Worker Adjustment and Retraining Notification) filing, the US law requiring 60 days' notice of mass layoffs at a single site, and never enters the domestic-only JOLTS sample the data war turns on. Oracle already showed the gap, its US filings covering under 4% of its cuts.

The legacy outsourcers are squeezed from the other side. TCS posted its first modern revenue decline and Infosys shed 8,400 in a quarter, with Wipro setting no fresher target for the year ahead. The firms that pioneered offshoring Western white-collar work are now losing it to the automation their clients are buying and to the in-house centres their clients are building.

Deep Analysis

In plain English

A Global Capability Centre, or GCC, is an overseas office that a company owns and runs itself, rather than hiring a separate company to do work on its behalf. JPMorgan can run a GCC in Bengaluru employing 5,000 Indian analysts doing the same work that 5,000 US employees used to do, without that shift appearing in any US government data. The WARN Act is a 1988 US law requiring companies to give 60 days notice before mass layoffs. It only covers US-based jobs at US-based offices. Moving work to a GCC in India is not a layoff in legal terms; no WARN filing is required. JOLTS (Job Openings and Labor Turnover Survey), the monthly Bureau of Labor Statistics survey that Stanford used to calculate its one-million-hire suppression figure, covers US employment only. Neither the WARN Act nor the JOLTS survey captures GCC job creation in India. NASSCOM is India's IT industry body. It reported that India's entire IT sector grew by about 140,000 jobs in the financial year 2026, reaching about 5.9 million workers. At the same time, the traditional Indian IT outsourcing companies, TCS, Infosys and Wipro, are shedding workers, and Wipro has set no graduate hiring target, because the multinational banks and tech firms they used to outsource to are bringing that work in-house through GCCs. The result is a two-speed India IT market: GCC jobs growing (run by multinationals, serving global demand) while traditional outsourcers shrink (run by Indian companies, losing clients to the GCC model). For workers in the US who lost jobs to AI, the work is not always gone; sometimes it moved to a GCC in India instead.

What could happen next?

Risk
US disclosure frameworks built around WARN Act filings and domestic-only labour surveys systematically undercount AI-plus-offshoring displacement, distorting the evidence base for policy intervention.
Consequence
India's traditional IT outsourcers (TCS, Infosys, Wipro) face structural revenue decline as their multinational clients bring work in-house through GCCs, compressing a major Indian export-services sector.

Source Landscape

This story draws on neutral-leaning sources

India's IT sector at 5.9 million workers represents approximately 4% of the country's formal employment, concentrated in Bengaluru, Hyderabad, Pune and Chennai.

The 140,000 net FY2026 additions mask a compositional shift: GCC employment grew while TCS posted its first modern revenue decline, Infosys shed 8,400 in a quarter, and Wipro set no fresher target for FY27. The sector is adding workers in multinational-run GCCs faster than it is shedding them from traditional outsourcers, but only at mid-career and senior levels.

For the US labour market, the GCC channel represents a disclosure gap with direct fiscal consequences. JPMorgan confirmed AI-driven displacement at its February 2026 investor meeting while simultaneously growing its India GCC. Goldman Sachs published the 25,000-monthly-substitution AI displacement model while also expanding India operations.

Each job moved offshore through this channel is one fewer US WARN filing, one fewer data point in Stanford's JOLTS sample, and one fewer unemployment insurance claim, even if the worker was displaced from a real US position. The measurement gap documented in the lead's NY Fed vs Stanford data war is partly explained by this structural invisibility.

Consensus view: Sumit Saha (NASSCOM Strategic Research) and Deloitte India's 2025 GCC report documented that the shift from third-party outsourcing to in-house GCCs accelerated specifically in financial services and technology from 2022 onward, driven by AI deployment risk management: firms found that controlling the data environment for AI training required owning the offshore delivery structure rather than licensing it to a third party.

This strategic driver, not cost arbitrage alone, is what explains why GCC growth continued even as overall AI-attributed cuts rose in the same companies' US operations.

Counter-view: Roshan Shetty (Azim Premji University, Bengaluru) and colleagues in India's labour-economics research community have challenged the NASSCOM net-growth framing by noting that GCC entry-level hiring fell 20-25% alongside the aggregate growth, meaning the sector is adding senior and mid-career workers while closing the entry pathway.

Shetty's 2025 working paper on structural exclusion in India's IT labour market argued that GCC expansion reproduces the same young-worker displacement the NY Fed identified in US AI-exposed occupations: total employment grows at the sector level while the pathway for new entrants shrinks.

Key tension: Whether India's GCC growth absorbs work relocated from the US (net positive for India, net negative for US) or instead reflects a global AI-driven rationalisation that ultimately shrinks total employment in both markets.

First Reported In

Update #10 · Rival studies split on AI's hit to jobs

Office for National Statistics· 24 May 2026

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Causes and effects

Caused by

India IT trio post first negative quarter

TCS posting its first modern revenue decline and Infosys cutting 8,400 reflects the same GCC displacement that NASSCOM's FY2026 figures now document at sector level.

Occurred 1 Apr 2026

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Wipro sets no target for its campus intake

Wipro's zero-fresher hiring target for FY27 is the firm-level response to the same competitive pressure from GCC expansion that NASSCOM documents at sector level.

Occurred 17 Apr 2026

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Dimon: JPMorgan displaced workers from AI

Dimon's confirmation of JPMorgan AI-driven displacement at the February investor meeting makes JPMorgan's simultaneous India GCC expansion the clearest single-firm example of the dual-channel pattern NASSCOM documents.

Occurred 24 Feb 2026

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This Event

India's GCCs absorb the offshored work

The fastest-growing displacement channel is the one no AI labour law or federal dataset can see.

Led to

India IT grows 140,000 as US firms cut

NASSCOM's May FY2026 data makes the offshore GCC magnitude concrete, building on the earlier finding that GCC expansion sits outside US disclosure regimes.

Occurred 27 May 2026

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Different Perspectives

Korea's four largest banks, as reported by News1

KB Kookmin, Shinhan, Hana and Woori rehired 1,013 retirees last year, equal to 79.1% of their graduate intake, according to News1. Graduates face a smaller entry intake while returners take fixed-term credit-screening roles at lower pay, News1 reports.

High Court of Justice of Madrid

The court's employment chamber ruled in judgment 864/2026, dated 8 October and made public in early November, that introducing AI is not on its own a ground for dismissal. Employers must prove AI's effect through the four causes the Workers' Statute already lists.

Singapore Ministry of Manpower

The Singapore Ministry of Manpower put third-quarter retrenchments at 4,800, concentrated in information and communications, financial services and manufacturing, with business reorganisation the main driver. Its release does not mention AI.

Challenger, Gray & Christmas

Challenger reported on 5 November that market and economic conditions overtook AI as the leading stated reason for 2026's US job cuts, at 130,531 against 121,401. AI was cited for 1,265 cuts in October, its lowest month of the year.

Office for Budget Responsibility

The OBR's 28 October outlook showed output per worker in information and communication growing 7.6% a year, yet kept AI's boost to UK productivity at 0.2 percentage points a year. It does not attribute the faster growth to AI.

Central Bank of Ireland

Governor Gabriel Makhlouf said on 2 November that AI investment has supported Irish activity and flagged the debt financing behind it as a financial-stability risk. On jobs, he named skills bottlenecks and mismatches, not job losses.

Written with AI from Lowdown's published reporting. Not individually reviewed by an editor. Editorial standards.