In her message to the industry leaders, Sitharaman urged them to continue moving decisively up the value chain by creating intellectual property, leading frontier research, and developing AI applications, own product architecture to drive global innovation.

She asked industry to deepen its engagement with knowledge institutions through stronger partnerships with universities, start-ups, and centres of excellence to ensure that innovation moves seamlessly from laboratories to markets.

As Tier-2 and Tier-3 cities are rapidly developing the talent, infrastructure and innovation capacity required for globally competitive enterprises, Sitharaman said the industry should look at expanding into the emerging cities.

“I encourage industry to engage proactively with state governments, city administrations, educational institutions and local communities to build that awareness and help prepare these cities for the next wave of GCC investment,” she said, adding that industry should build partnerships with governments by sharing practical feedback on policy, processes, talent and infrastructure. Urging enterprises that have invested successfully in India to become ambassadors for India’s capabilities, she said their success stories are the “strongest endorsement of India’s GCC ecosystem”.

The finance minister said the next phase of GCC growth cannot remain confined to a handful of metropolitan centres. “If the first 2,000 GCCs were concentrated in metropolitan centres, the next wave of India’s GCC growth will be geographically far more diverse. The geography of global value creation itself is changing. Tomorrow’s breakthrough in artificial intelligence, engineering design or product development could emerge as readily from Varanasi, Chandigarh, Visakhapatnam, Tiruchirappalli or Mysuru as from Bengaluru, Hyderabad or Gurugram.”

“These cities are offering competitive operating costs, and they are also rapidly developing a mature innovation base, emerging as powerful centres of innovation,” she said.

The establishment of a GCC in one of these cities has a multiplier impact, Sitharaman said. “It creates demand for advanced skills and specialised training. It supports start-ups, professional services, housing, urban infrastructure and research collaborations. It also encourages stronger partnerships between universities, industry and local institutions, helping cities evolve into vibrant innovation ecosystems. In doing so, GCCs become catalysts for balanced regional development,” she said.

The minister said states can develop specialised ecosystems aligned to their own abilities and needs as different states possess different competitive advantages, which will help make India’s overall innovation ecosystem more resilient, diversified and globally competitive.

India is a global hub of GCCs, with the CEA pointing out that there may be more than 2,000 such centres in the country possibly employing more than 2 million people, with revenue heading towards $100 billion. On the whole, they account for around 2% of India’s GDP.

With more and more global companies – from banks to carmakers and semiconductor firms – performing cutting-edge work in artificial intelligence and machine learning in these GCCs, India has become the second-largest base of enterprise AI talent in the world.

Addressing fears that AI may replace Indian professionals such as coders, Nageswaran said that if the value of a GCC lies in “doing simple tasks at low cost, then that value is under real threat”. However, he argued that the building, deployment, and governing of AI still requires humans – and this work is only increasing, with a growing share of it being done in India. And in well-run GCCs, AI only raises the value of each employee.

In such a situation, the government and industry must work together to ensure GCCs don’t stand still and “move up”, with Nageswaran asserting that while the government “can build the runway… It cannot fly the plane.”

Listing the announcements made in the 2026-27 Union Budget, presented on February 1, that provided tax certainty to GCCs and simplified and expanded the transfer-pricing safe harbour along with a higher threshold, Nageswaran said industry must now help make the “move from cost to capability, from execution to innovation”. This includes skilling in the form of day-one ready graduates, which will require universities, industry, and the government to work together at the same time.

With the value of GCCs lying in the judgment of the people who run them, the goal according to the CEA is not to make people work like machines but to free staff to do what machines can’t do: reason, decide, take responsibility, and exercise wisdom.

“If we keep the human being at the centre, these centres will do more than survive the age of artificial intelligence. They will help to shape it. And India will be the better for it,” he said.