Retail GCCs Want More AI, But Where is the Talent?

India’s retail and consumer global capability centres (GCCs) are ramping up AI investments and increasingly building for merchandising, pricing, demand forecasting, inventory optimisation and customer experience. 

But a new study suggests the biggest constraint is no longer access to AI talent. It is access to experienced AI leaders who understand retail.

A report by TeamLease Digital estimates that India’s 180 retail and consumer GCCs collectively employ only around 320 AI professionals with more than eight years of experience. This averages fewer than two senior AI specialists per centre. 

The report argued that companies are increasingly competing for specialised AI capabilities rather than generic technology talent, with AI and machine learning professionals commanding some of the highest salary premiums in the sector.

The findings come as retail GCCs deepen their role beyond shared services into product development, customer experience, supply chain, merchandising and AI-led innovation. Yet industry experts say the headline number tells only part of the story.

Only 2 Senior AI Experts per GCC

According to TeamLease Digital, AI talent remains concentrated in a small number of mature centres. The report estimates that AI and ML professionals with six or more years of experience earn a market median salary of ₹60.6 lakh annually. 

At the senior end, professionals with over 15 years of experience can command up to ₹1.2 crore at the 90th percentile. Mid-career AI professionals also receive the sharpest premium, earning nearly twice as much as the broader technology median in the three-to-six-year experience bracket.

However, Ravi Darbha, Partner and Head of Hyderabad Center at Zinnov, says averaging senior AI talent across all retail GCCs creates a misleading picture. “The average understates where AI capability actually sits, not how much of it exists. Senior AI talent does not distribute evenly across retail GCCs.”

According to Zinnov’s estimates, retail and FMCG GCCs employ roughly 900 professionals with more than 10 years of overall AI and ML experience. Around 300 have a decade of AI-specific experience, broadly aligning with TeamLease’s estimate.

Darbha argues that the more important number is often overlooked.

“Roughly 7,000 professionals carry AI/ML skills across these GCCs, while about 2,000 sit in roles explicitly classified as AI/ML. That gap is the real story of how retail is building AI capability.”

Rather than building large standalone AI teams, he says retailers increasingly embed AI capabilities across engineering, analytics, merchandising and supply chain functions.

The Hardest Role Isn’t an AI Engineer

The TeamLease report also pointed to a widening pay premium for experienced AI professionals. AI specialists with six to 10 years of experience earn a median salary of ₹68 lakh, compared with ₹39.8 lakh for the broader technology workforce. The premium narrows slightly at senior levels but remains among the highest across specialist functions.

KPMG believes the shortage is less about coding expertise and more about business leadership.

“It is more important to understand whether organisations have enough leaders who understand both retail and AI,” says Puneet Mansukhani, Global Retail Head of Digital and Technology Transformation, KPMG in India. 

“Ultimately, the shortage is not of AI talent, it is of business leaders who know where AI can create measurable commercial value,” he says, adding that the shift is also changing hiring priorities.

He believes that the most difficult roles are no longer pure technology positions. Rather, the market is looking for AI product leaders, enterprise architects and transformation leaders who understand merchandising, customer experience, pricing, supply chain and store operations as well as AI.

Zinnov echoed that assessment, arguing that the scarcest professionals combine AI expertise with deep retail knowledge across demand forecasting, merchandising, pricing and supply chain operations.

Why More Hiring Won’t Fix the Gap

Both firms believe retailers are changing how they build AI capabilities rather than simply increasing recruitment.

As for the GCCs, Sneha Singh, Senior Manager for HR Business Partner at Wayfair India TDC, says the competitive landscape for AI talent is no longer limited to retail. “We’re increasingly competing with hyperscalers, product companies and other GCCs for people who can combine deep technical expertise with the ability to solve complex, real-world problems at scale.” 

This also means that companies need to offer meaningful problems, strong engineering environments and the opportunity to build AI capabilities with global impact, rather than just offering a role.

According to Darbha, mature AI capabilities are increasingly bought through platforms while retailers build proprietary business workflows internally with smaller senior teams.

“Retailers are not responding to this talent picture by trying to hire their way to a higher per-centre number. They are moving toward a more balanced model that changes what they hire for rather than how much.”

Mansukhani also believes internal capability building will become increasingly important. “Lateral hiring provides immediate capability, but no organisation can hire its way to AI maturity.”

Instead, leading retail GCCs are investing in upskilling engineers, developing AI product managers and building cross-functional teams that combine retail expertise with technology capabilities.

TeamLease Digital’s report reaches a similar conclusion. It argues that competitive advantage is shifting from workforce scale towards specialised capability. 

It recommends that GCCs accelerate AI leadership development, redesign early-career talent programmes, build AI capability layers sooner and diversify locations beyond Bengaluru to reduce concentration risk.

The report also notes that India’s retail GCC ecosystem employs around 2,72,300 professionals today. As AI adoption accelerates, the defining challenge may no longer be finding engineers, but producing leaders capable of owning global AI products and embedding AI into core retail operations.

EY also noted in a report that, as retail GCCs take ownership of global product, merchandising and customer-facing decisions, the industry appears to be shifting its hiring focus from AI engineers to leaders who can translate AI into business outcomes.