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This is the fifth and last issue of our India Rising Perspective by Zinnov: “Engineering Europe’s Future with India”. I’m super excited that I have the opportunity to share this series with you, and thankful for the contribution by the Zinnov team.

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India’s rise as the world’s 3rd largest economy is not unfolding in isolation. It is being shaped through deep and strategic partnerships with Europe’s leading enterprises. Across Germany, the UK, and broader EMEA, companies are strengthening their global competitiveness by building long-term capability in India.

This story is no longer about outsourcing or cost efficiency. It is about engineering velocity, AI-driven transformation, workforce reinvention, and collaborative operating models that integrate India into the core of European enterprises.

To understand how this capability corridor is being built — and what it means for Europe’s future — we turn to one of the region’s leading advisors on Global Capability Centers and enterprise transformation.

In this series, Mohammed Faraz Khan, Partner at Zinnov, will share insights from across EMEA on how European organizations are designing, scaling, and transforming their Global Capability Centers in India — and how this partnership is reshaping competitiveness on both sides.

The author of today’s issue of the India Rising Perspective - Engineering Europe’s Future with India is Mohammed Faraz Khan, Partner at Zinnov.

Faraz spearheads Zinnov’s GCC Setup and Transformation practice for the EMEA region and is based in London. He advises Fortune 500 and mid-market European organizations on designing, scaling, and optimizing Global Capability Centers to accelerate globalization and unlock long-term value.

With deep expertise spanning workforce transformation, collaborative operating models, productivity enhancement, and innovation enablement, Faraz works across industries including Industrial & Engineering, Automotive, BFSI, Software & Internet, Energy, and Semiconductors. He is actively shaping the GCC narrative in EMEA and has been featured in leading publications such as The Economic Times and Fortune India.

Through this series, Faraz brings a practitioner’s lens to the evolving Europe-India partnership — grounded in enterprise transformation, AI enablement, and strategic capability building.

Enjoy the fifth and last issue of our series!

Part 5 of India Rising Perspective - Engineering Europe’s Future with India
By Mohammed Faraz Khan

Trade agreements create corridors. Companies decide whether those corridors become competitive advantage.

Over the past year, Europe-India engagement has moved beyond intent into structure. The EU and India have concluded negotiations for a landmark Free Trade Agreement, the Trade and Technology Council continues to deepen cooperation across digital, clean technology, and resilient supply chains, and the UK-India CETA has reinforced the broader Europe-India direction.

At a macro level, the corridor is being built. But corridors, by themselves, do not create advantage. They create the conditions for it. The real question is whether enterprises can adopt these new pathways and turn them into operating advantage.

Because competitiveness is not built by agreements alone. It is built by how companies organize capability, technology, talent, and innovation within the opportunities those agreements create.

For a long time, the Europe-India conversation was framed around a simple decision:

Should we build capability in India?

That question has largely been answered.

Across industries, European enterprises have already built deep engineering and digital capability through India-based GCCs. Bosch, Mercedes-Benz, Siemens, BMW, SAP, Deutsche Bank, Ericsson, and many others have established significant India centres that contribute to global engineering, product development, digital platforms, and enterprise transformation.India is already part of the operating model. The leadership question now is how deliberately it is designed into the enterprise.

Because the forces reshaping enterprises are converging:

What sits ahead is a phase of connected capability — where GCCs, AI, ecosystem partnerships, and headquarters strategy need to operate as one system, not as parallel initiatives.

One of the clearest shifts across the past decade is how GCC portfolios have evolved. What began as execution-heavy work has steadily moved toward expertise-driven and frontier capability — in some cases approaching the mix seen at headquarters.

At the same time, AI is accelerating this transition. Zinnov’s latest research, based on analysis of 1.7M+ job descriptions across 60+ countries, shows that over 55% of GCC work portfolios are now under displacement pressure as AI compresses the journey from expertise to automation.

That creates a sharper leadership challenge. Capability cannot be treated as a static footprint anymore. It has to be continuously redesigned as work shifts, automates, and recombines.

Execution remains important. Domain expertise becomes more valuable. AI changes the relationship between the two. The value increasingly sits in the combination: execution that is intelligent, domain expertise that is codified, and AI that is embedded into workflows rather than treated as a separate layer.

Capability is no longer a place. It is a system. And that system increasingly spans geographies.

The second shift is where innovation comes from.

The inputs required to build modern products — across automotive systems, healthcare platforms, industrial solutions, and financial platforms — are no longer owned entirely within the enterprise.

They are distributed across:

India’s role in this has changed accordingly.

What was once viewed primarily as a talent base is now becoming a structured innovation system. That system includes 3,100+ AI startups across sectors and layers, a concentrated cohort of execution-ready companies in the USD 5-50M range, and 1,300+ incubators and accelerators spanning academic, corporate, private, and public ecosystems.

The academic layer matters just as much as the startup layer. Institutions such as IISc, IIT Bombay, and IIT Madras Research Park are not just producing talent; they are enabling applied research, industry collaboration, and long-term capability development. Bosch’s engagement with IISc around cyber-physical systems, Deutsche Bank’s partnership with IIT Bombay Research Park, and broader industry-academia collaborations across Germany-headquartered GCCs show how research is becoming part of the enterprise innovation system.

The essence has evolved from the fact that India has scale. India now offers multiple routes into innovation — startups for speed, academia for research depth, corporate platforms for scale, and public-private infrastructure for experimentation.

For European enterprises, that changes the nature of engagement. India is no longer only where capability is built. It is increasingly where capability is accessed, tested, connected, and scaled.

This is where the role of the GCC requires a more nuanced reading. In earlier phases, the GCC was primarily judged by the capability it could build internally: engineering depth, digital scale, operational resilience, and product ownership.

The next phase will be judged by how well it connects internal capability with external sources of advantage.

Across Germany-headquartered enterprises, this shift is already visible:

But the stronger signal is in the outcomes.

A strong case in point is Bosch’s DNA Nxt program that has created a structured startup pipeline, attracting 6,000+ applications, graduating 90+ startups, and enabling multiple investments and joint go-to-market partnerships. Mercedes-Benz’s Startup Autobahn India further amplifies the sentiment: the initiative follows a different model: to date, it has engaged 289 startups, run 380 pilot projects, and converted roughly 30% of those pilots into production deployments. These are not branding exercises. They are mechanisms for moving external innovation into enterprise systems.

SAP Labs India shows another version of the same shift. Its startup and ecosystem programs have brought together 3,000+ participants, 10+ unicorn founders, 25+ VCs, and 50+ enterprise customers. That positions the GCC not just as a builder of products, but as a convener of founders, customers, investors, and platform teams.

Deutsche Bank’s India GCC adds a third dimension: organizational adoption. Through its AI Forward initiative, the center has trained over 20,000 employees, created a startup-style internal incubator, and embedded AI specialists into teams to prototype solutions in live environments. The ambition is not just AI usage, but deeper product and platform ownership from the GCC.

Ericsson’s Global AI Accelerator offers a fourth pattern — scaling AI capability across domains such as 5G, IoT, and automation through a centralized capability structure that can create reusable AI assets for the enterprise.

These are different models. But they point to the same underlying shift. The GCC is becoming the integration layer between enterprise intent and ecosystem capability.

For European leaders, this becomes a design question. The next phase of competitiveness depends on how GCCs, AI, ecosystems, and domain expertise are designed together.

Earlier, many enterprises could treat these as separate tracks:

That separation made sense when each track moved at its own pace.

It is becoming less effective now, because the work itself is converging. AI changes GCC portfolios. Ecosystems supply AI and domain-specific innovation. GCCs become the place where those inputs are integrated into product, platform, and operating roadmaps.

That design has four components:

The companies that get this right will not simply have strong India centres. They will have a stronger global operating model.

If the previous sections describe how capability, AI, and ecosystems are converging, fragmentation is what happens when they are not designed to work together.

Most organizations are not short on investment. They are investing across all the right areas:

The challenge is that these investments are often made in parallel, rather than as part of a single operating model. A company may have a mature GCC, but if AI remains confined to pilots, the centre does not fully influence productivity or product transformation.

It may have strong startup partnerships, but if those partnerships are not integrated into engineering roadmaps, pilots struggle to become platforms.

It may have academic collaborations, but if research is not linked to future capability planning, the relationship remains reputational rather than strategic.

In isolation, each of these investments creates value. In combination — if not designed coherently — they create friction.

This is the real cost of fragmentation:

In an AI-driven cycle, where time-to-scale is a competitive variable, this friction compounds quickly. Which brings the conversation back to design.

The question is no longer whether enterprises are investing in the right areas.
It is whether those investments are connected in a way that allows them to scale together.

For European enterprises, this translates into a clear imperative: move from parallel capability building to integrated capability design — where GCCs, AI initiatives, and ecosystem partnerships are structured to operate as a single system, not separate tracks.

Across this series, we have looked at the evolution of GCCs — from execution engines to innovation hubs, from capability centres to ecosystem connectors. What becomes clear, when viewed together, is that none of these shifts exist in isolation.

AI is reshaping work.
Ecosystems are expanding the sources of innovation.
GCCs are evolving in role and ownership.

The real shift is in how these elements are coming together, and that is where the idea of the corridor needs to be reframed.

A corridor connects two points. What European enterprises are now building is something more integrated — a system where those points begin to operate as one. The Europe–India corridor is no longer just about access — to talent, to scale, or to capability.

It is becoming the foundation for a shared operating architecture where:

are not layered on top of each other but designed to work together.

The companies that will benefit most from this corridor are not the ones that use it more. They are the ones that design around it.

Because in the end, competitiveness will not be determined by how much capability an enterprise builds — but by how coherently that capability is connected, across geographies, systems, and ecosystems.

Sources: Zinnov

If you want to explore more on this topic or have questions, please reach out to the author via LinkedIn.

Disclaimer: Any use of the data or graphics require prior approval from Zinnov.

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