The state of pharma commercial services in India-based GCCs

Global capability centers (GCCs) are increasingly playing a critical role in delivering high-value services. In recent years, there has been a noticeable increase in the number of pharma GCCs established globally. By 2030, pharma is expected to spend around $27.5 billion on GCCs alone. The age of GCCs acting solely as cost-savings hubs is a thing of the past. Already in the present, these centers are hubs for strategic influence on global business. And in the future, we expect to see that solidify even more.

For pharma research and development, they manage clinical data, support pharmacovigilance and facilitate regulatory submissions. In supply chain management, companies use GCCs to optimize logistics, demand planning and inventory control while also offering financial services, IT support and operational excellence.

Most notably though, GCCs add substantial value to commercial operations, delivering data-driven insights, undertaking advanced analytics, enabling automation and more to enhance sales strategies, marketing effectiveness and customer engagement.

We examined eight of the top 15 pharma organizations, based on a study by ZS in partnership with the Everest Group. We considered how these organizations are strategizing their GCCs, growing their capabilities and expanding the role that India is playing in this evolution.

India has emerged as a preferred destination for pharma companies to set up GCCs, housing 40% of the total pharma GCC workforce across the globe. In the past five years, India GCCs have seen their scale in pharma commercial services grow by approximately 2.5 times. This increase is due to cost advantage and the skilled talent pool in key hubs such as Bengaluru, Hyderabad, Pune and Chennai.

This increasing confidence in relocating strategic operations to India also suggests there’s a great potential for further expansion, as current penetration levels are between 10% and 20%.

Several key trends explain why India is a primary hub for GCCs:

• Evolving expertise: GCCs are transitioning from transactional service providers to comprehensive pharma commercial service hubs capable of providing end-to-end services. They now deliver value-added services such as portfolio analytics, brand diagnostics and incentive planning, reflecting a shift toward more judgment-intensive activities.
• Shift to hybrid models: The pharma industry is increasingly adopting hybrid models, integrating internal GCC capabilities with third-party outsourcing. While transactional tasks are outsourced, high-value activities like market intelligence and pricing strategy are being internalized, balancing cost efficiency with enhanced capabilities.
• Expanding delivery roles: GCCs are moving beyond basic delivery ownership, with some pharma organizations entrusting them with end-to-end ownership of key subfunctions. Additionally, some GCCs are also establishing global process owner roles for certain services, highlighting their growing strategic role.

To understand the changing role and growth of India GCCs in delivering commercial services, we studied five of the key subfunctions that broadly define the commercial space and looked at them through the lens of service maturity, scale of operations and sourcing mix in the figure below.

Marketing operations

GCCs in this subfunction are gradually transitioning to deliver judgment-intensive services. Over 70% of GCCs now manage global omnichannel marketing operations, providing services such as social listening, web analytics, SEO and omnichannel reporting. The overall scale has expanded substantially in the last two years as well. There’s also an expansion in areas like portfolio analytics, brand strategy and forecasting.

While GCCs are steadily increasing their ownership of marketing functions, outsourcing remains an essential component for accessing niche expertise (such as supporting product launches) and ensuring agility in dynamic market environments.

Competitive intelligence and analytics

The competitive intelligence and analytics subfunction has evolved from basic data aggregation to sophisticated insight generation, with over 55% of GCCs now delivering high-complexity tasks such as in-depth market research, advanced market analytics and product launch strategies. The scale and support for various analytics processes are likely to expand further.

Most GCCs have established in-house teams capable of delivering end-to-end activities; however, data collection and specialized research are often outsourced. This hybrid-sourcing model ensures access to high-quality data while allowing GCCs to focus on analytics and strategic interpretation.

Pricing, reimbursement and market access

In pricing, reimbursement and market access, GCCs mostly handle moderate- or low-complexity operational work. However, GCCs are starting to expand into strategic areas like health economics and outcomes research. Process ownership remains moderate, however, with market access and pricing negotiations still largely managed by affiliate organizations while GCCs provide critical analytics support.

The degree of involvement of GCCs in this space is increasing, by mostly leveraging in-house teams, while external vendors are being leveraged to outsource specialized data analysis tools and pricing intelligence.

Promotional material design and production

Promotional material design and production is a relatively low maturity subfunction, with GCCs primarily responsible for low-to-moderate complexity activities such as logo designs, slide templates and brand assets. The maturity of ideation and design remains moderate, as many creative processes follow corporate-driven mandates requiring standardization across regions.

Decision-making for core design tasks is typically retained at the global level. However, control on creative services (content creation and internal communication designs) is increasing. Although a highly outsourced space, where most organizations rely on external vendors for complex creative functions (such as brand asset maximization and digital content creation) a few organizations have taken full ownership of promotional material design for specific products and geographies, signaling a potential shift toward greater internalization in the future.

Sales operations, incentive planning and sales training

Maturity within this subfunction varies. There’s a shifting focus from low-complexity tasks to judgment-intensive activities within sales operations and incentive planning services, but sales training capabilities are at a nascent stage and are still developing. While the maturity and scale is growing across the board, the ownership of key decisions across services resides with affiliate teams.

GCCs continue to engage third-party vendors for technology (incentive management tools) and specialized knowledge in certain areas (sales training). At the same time, some mature GCCs are beginning to take on automation-heavy and analytics-driven tasks, signaling a gradual shift toward internalization.

A strong focus on tech-driven capabilities is a defining characteristic of India GCCs, marked by a strategic blend of external partnerships and internal development. While India GCCs are involved in building tools and models on top of procured products to customize it to their organization’s context, they collaborate with vendor partners to digitize major aspects of commercial operations. Prominent examples include leveraging intelligent content management systems to automate content creation and provide real-time analytics and deploying learning and development solutions to aid multiformat training across teams. These vendor collaborations are aimed at both driving digital transformation via global system integrators as well as building domain-specific solution by partnering with life sciences experts. Here are three ways digital is transforming GCCs in pharma:

• Improved insights through end-to-end platforms. GCCs are integrating end-to-end platforms to enhance engagement, channel optimization, content management and learning and development. These platforms drive efficiency by enabling dynamic recommendations, real-time insights and personalized content delivery, ultimately improving customer engagement and commercial operations.
• Enhanced operations through tech partnerships. GCCs are actively leveraging commercial off-the-shelf solutions (such as customer relationship management systems and omnichannel marketing tools) to streamline operations and improve customer engagement. Beyond tool adoption, GCCs also seek advisory services from tech vendors to refine their commercial strategies and drive business outcomes.
• Developing in-house tools. Alongside external collaborations, GCCs are developing tailored in-house tools and solutions. This hybrid approach allows them to maintain control over critical processes while leveraging third-party expertise for innovation and scalability. This transformation is not only helping India GCCs enhance operational efficiency but also assisting parent organizations in driving innovation and enhancing competitiveness in the market. Further, building AI-led automation and advanced analytical capabilities is enabling faster, data-driven decision-making, positioning India GCCs at the forefront of innovation.

India-based GCCs are fast emerging as strategic hubs for global commercial operations, defined by their growing ability to deliver value-added services and accelerate AI and gen AI adoption across functions. Looking ahead, areas such as portfolio analytics, forecasting, pricing strategy and HEOR are poised for growth and deeper ownership within these centers.

As organizations embrace this evolution and focus on defining the future possibilities, commercial and GCC leaders should critically consider:

1. The transformative potential of GCCs in driving the organization’s shift to a new commercial model.
2. The importance of fostering transparency and trust between global and local teams to ensure effective centralization.
3. Strategic investment choices that balance building internal capabilities with leveraging external partnerships for sustained competitiveness.
4. How GCCs can serve as engines of innovation by adopting and scaling new technologies, capabilities and ways of working.

Discover how ZS is helping leading organizations shape the next chapter of their GCC journey.