Global companies now treat their Indian technology hubs as innovation centers rather than back-office operations, and executives from Daimler Truck, Kimberly-Clark, and Publicis Groupe’s Epsilon told a Nasscom summit in Bengaluru this week that AI is about to accelerate that shift further still. The pattern they described, and the one that NewsTrackerToday mapped as the story’s central thread, is consistent: AI tools handle the routine coding, documentation, and process tasks that previously consumed skilled engineers’ time, freeing those engineers to work on novel problems that generate intellectual property. “The number of IPs, the patents and the trade secrets created by GCCs in India is already increasing,” said Radhakrishnan Kodakkal, head of Daimler Truck Innovation Center India. “AI would accelerate it.”
India’s global capability centres generated approximately $98.4 billion in revenue in the last fiscal year, hitting an industry projection that analysts had not expected to be reached until 2028, according to a joint report by Nasscom and consultancy Zinnov. A separate Nasscom report showed patent filings in India rose 11.3% to over 90,000 in fiscal year 2024, with nearly half from multinational companies. But the headline filing figures understate GCC contributions for a specific reason: much of the intellectual property generated in Indian centres gets filed through parent entities in the United States and Europe, not in India directly.
Sophie Leclerc, who covers the technology sector, reads the implications carefully: “What AI does in a GCC context is compress the distance between an engineer having a useful idea and that idea becoming a documented, technically complete invention disclosure. The patent itself still requires legal processing, but the work that makes a patent possible – the precise technical description of what is novel and non-obvious – can now be drafted much faster with AI assistance. If that acceleration is real and it compounds across dozens of large GCC operators, the volume of IP production coming out of India over the next three to five years could look structurally different from today’s numbers. The caveat is that the patent office infrastructure has to scale with it, which is a real operational constraint.” That infrastructure gap is what NewsTrackerToday took apart from the executive accounts: the bottleneck is not ambition or engineering capacity, it is the filing process itself.
Deena Dayalan, global head of digital operations and cloud transformation at Kimberly-Clark, was direct about the regulatory friction. Kimberly-Clark does not file any patents from India, routing everything through the U.S. instead, because the process in India takes five to six months just for initial filing – roughly double the U.S. timeline – with approval adding several more years. India has far fewer patent examiners relative to filing volume than the United States, according to Nasscom. High legal costs and procedural ambiguities compound the delay. New Delhi-based IP lawyer Harsh Kaushik acknowledged the backlog but noted that recent moves to put more Indian Patent Office functions online and centralize application allocation have eased the process at the margins.
Daniel Wu draws the geopolitical dimension: “India is positioning its GCC ecosystem as an alternative to China in the global technology supply chain – lower geopolitical risk for U.S. and European companies, comparable engineering talent depth, and now a government that actively courts this investment. The IP filing route through U.S. parent entities is a temporary workaround for infrastructure gaps, not a structural barrier. If India’s patent system catches up to the filing volume its GCCs are generating, the country starts to appear in global innovation metrics in a more visible way.” The gap between where India’s GCC innovation output actually sits and where international IP statistics register it is precisely what NewsTrackerToday pulled to the front of this story.
Three things to watch as this dynamic develops: whether India’s Indian Patent Office recruitment and examiner capacity expands in line with the projected growth in GCC filings over the next two to three years; whether major GCC operators begin shifting even a fraction of their patent filings to India directly as the filing process improves, which would show up in Indian patent statistics rather than only in U.S. Patent and Trademark Office data; and whether the Nasscom-Zinnov revenue projections for GCC output, already running four years ahead of prior estimates, get revised upward again as AI compresses the timeline between idea and commercializable IP. The $98.4 billion figure is already a surprise. The patent data that News Tracker Today connects to it suggests the innovation story is even larger than the revenue number alone implies.
