AI Professionals Earn More From GCCs: TeamLease Report
GCCs are paying 3 times more to some AI professionals as these increasingly own platforms, products, and business-critical outcomes.
As per one of the latest TeamLease Digital reports, GCCs in India are paying AI specialists up to 3 times more than professionals in some support roles, as the centres take on greater responsibility for technology and business transformation.
According to the report, 44% of these centres have reached the Portfolio Hub or Transformation stage. At this level, they increasingly own platforms, products, AI adoption and business-critical outcomes.
TeamLease Digital said in a statement that the study was conducted across 37,000 tech and digital roles.
India has 2,117 active GCCs, employing 23.6 lakh highly skilled professionals and generating $98.4 billion in annual revenue. The country also has more than 2.5 lakh AI and machine learning (ML) professionals and over 1,200 AI-enabled GCCs. It ranks first globally in AI hiring, according to the findings.
AI adoption is also expanding across these centres. Some 83% of GCCs are scaling generative AI (GenAI), while 70% follow a hybrid AI model. Another 58% are investing in agentic AI.
As GCCs take on more responsibility, pay for specialised talent is rising. The average salary increment at GCCs stands at 10.4% in 2026, compared with the India Inc. average of 9.1%. AI, ML, cybersecurity and cloud skills command a 30–40% pay premium, as demand outpaces supply.
However, the premium varies by role. TeamLease Digital’s AI Talent Landscape divides jobs into 3 categories: AI-Core, AI-Adjacent and AI-Support.
AI-Core roles involve building and owning intelligent systems. The report identifies these roles within the AI family and AI risk governance. AI-Adjacent roles apply AI to established workflows and span data, cloud and cybersecurity. The analysis found no AI-Support roles commanding a salary premium in GCCs.
The gap is visible even at the start of a career. For professionals with 0–2 years of experience, AI-Core roles offer median fixed salaries ranging from ₹10.8 lakh per annum (LPA) for data scientists to ₹13.2 LPA for GenAI engineers.
AI-Adjacent roles pay ₹9 LPA for cybersecurity engineers and ₹10.2 LPA for data engineers. AI-Support roles offer ₹4.8 LPA for data quality analysts and ₹5.4 LPA for application support engineers.
This puts starting pay for AI-Core roles at 2.5–3 times that of AI-Support roles. AI-Core roles are also projected to grow faster, at 16–21%, compared with 7–8% for AI-Support roles.
The difference becomes more pronounced at senior levels, particularly in architecture roles. Among professionals with 15 or more years of experience, AI-Core roles offer median fixed pay ranging from ₹92.8 LPA for principal data scientists to ₹108.6 LPA for AI architects.
AI-Adjacent roles offer ₹86.4 LPA for data architects and ₹98.6 LPA for cloud security architects. AI-Support salaries range from ₹36.8 LPA for data operations managers to ₹79.8 LPA for FinOps managers.
AI architects, lead GenAI engineers and cloud security architects can earn ₹97–109 LPA, according to the analysis. These salaries are roughly 2–3 times those of senior AI-Support roles. The roles are also projected to grow at 19–21%.
The report identifies GenAI, ML and data science as the highest-return skilling pathways for salary growth in GCCs during FY27–28.
Skills in large language models (LLMs), retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) and prompt engineering are projected to grow by 20.5% during the period. Machine learning skills, including PyTorch, TensorFlow and model deployment, are projected to grow by 18.7%.
At senior levels, LLM architecture, RAG at scale and agentic AI lead the projected growth at 20.8%. AI architecture, MLOps, GenAI strategy and model governance follow at 19.6%.
Commenting on the findings, Neeti Sharma, CEO of TeamLease Digital, said the role of GCCs in India is changing.
“The GCC story in India is no longer about where work gets done. It is about who shapes what global enterprises build next. As these centres take on the thinking, ownership and accountability behind AI, India is becoming central to how enterprises across the world transform. The next phase of GCC growth will be led less by scale of headcount and more by judgment, governance and the ability to turn AI into business outcomes. The task for India now is to build talent at that depth, so that GCCs remain not just an execution hub for global enterprises, but a source of their innovation and strategic capability,” Sharma said.