Why is India becoming a prominent destination for workforce expansion?

In an exclusive and illuminating interview, Nitin Chandel, Group VP & India Country Manager, UKG, shares his expert perspective on the strategic evolution of Global Capability Centres (GCCs). Sareen, a seasoned technologist with a background at BNY Mellon, Microsoft, and Visa, provides a detailed look at how UKG’s Indian operations have moved beyond a mere cost centre to become a pivotal hub for innovation.

The conversation reveals how the company is leveraging India's top-tier talent to drive its "AI-first" strategy, focusing on developing intelligent, AI-powered agents and addressing the unique needs of the global frontline workforce.

UKG's India GCC is focused on innovation. What is the strategic vision behind this, and how does the R&D contribution from India translate into UKG’s global products and AI leadership?

In India, with our headcount of around 4,000 employees, we do a bunch of things. We have a very large tech presence, and a lot of our platforms are built out of India. We also have product management, customer success, and implementation teams based here. So India is a very large part of our operations. I would say AI is one of the key initiatives we are driving out of India, but it is not just AI. Across UKG, we see ourselves as an "AI-first" company, and there is a lot of focus on AI in everything we do, including our internal operations and our products.

When we were thinking about a new centre in Pune, the focus was to really rally around this new-gen technology and attract the best talent to make it an AI hub. A lot of our AI work, including agentic AI, is happening out of India. We are creating an agentic framework where we become digital partners for our customers. Whether it is a payroll administrator or an HR administrator, we want them to have these digital partners or assistants to handle a lot of the non-value-add but time-consuming tasks.

A lot of these agents are being built entirely in India. We have a compliance agent, for example, that is being built out of India. We are a large player in global payroll, and a payroll administrator today has to constantly look for new compliance and regulatory changes that happen monthly, especially in the US, where the 50 states have different and constantly changing requirements. This is a very high-touch task. Our agent will look for new compliance changes, laws, and regulations, and can propose changes to a company's payroll, all the way to suggesting a different tax deduction.

Another example is in the healthcare vertical, where we are very big. Our WFM product is used by a lot of nurses and medical staff for their shifts and check-ins. When a specialised nurse wants to take a break or leave, scheduling is a complex issue, unlike in a large IT company. These nurses have specialisations and certifications for very specific tasks. We are working on an agent that will look at the nurse's specialisation, other people with similar certifications, check their availability, and go to the supervisor with a decision point, saying, "X wants to take a vacation. Here is another qualified person who is ready to take the shift." The supervisor just has to say yes. In today's world, that would involve a lot of discussions and people figuring things out. We are developing a lot of agents. Our goal for the next fiscal year is to do 40-plus agents, and a lot of them are being done out of India.

From a generic perspective on the GCC industry, India has emerged as a major hub. What has made India's strategic vision for global tech companies so indispensable for them to come here and drive innovation?

If you look at the journey of GCCs, probably two decades ago, India became the centre of outsourcing, largely because of cost. You could find good talent at a significantly cheaper price. As India is the only other country with the scale to have thousands of people, after China. Other countries in Eastern Europe and South America may have good talent, but they are limited in population and the number of qualified people. India is the only country where you can find millions of people with a formal education in computer science.

Second, a lot of companies that came here for cost purposes realised that cost savings came with an overhead of time zone differences and a lack of innovation. Many companies were simply delivering what was asked without driving innovation. Today, GCCs are at different stages of evolution. The one extreme is where a few GCCs are still pure cost plays. However, a lot of players are moving to the other side of the continuum, where cost becomes a secondary benefit. UKG is on that other extreme. We are here because we know we can find the best talent in India at scale for the kind of work we want to do.

The talent in India is exceptional, especially with our thriving startup ecosystem and top-tier institutions like the IITs and NITs, where so much research and innovation are happening. The new generation of talent does not just want to deliver on what is asked of them; they want to own and drive innovation. This is why any company that needs scale probably wants to be in India. A few weeks ago, I was looking at an article that said GCC numbers are expected to double or triple in the next five to ten years. A lot of GCCs are still on that journey from being a pure execution centre to a centre of complete ownership and innovation.

When we talk about the workforce in the tech industry, we often refer to the IT workforce. However, frontline workers make up the majority of the global workforce. They are often overlooked by the technology industry. Could you explain the key challenges they face, why their needs have been historically underserved, and what UKG is doing to solve their issues?

If you had asked me this a year ago, I would have probably had a different response. A lot of us in the tech industry have a lot of exposure to what I will call "knowledge workers," and our ecosystem is defined by what happens with them. A lot of times, we do not even know what is going on with frontline workers.

Now that I have joined UKG, I know that our mission has been to serve frontline workers for decades. Our strength is not knowledge workers, but frontline workers. Their needs are very different. Unlike economically well-established knowledge workers, frontline workers have a different profile. They might be paid every week, work multiple jobs, and their work is often seasonal. We support these patterns. For example, some companies hire very few workers throughout the year but do 5X their hiring between October and December. We have products that support this. We also know that frontline workers use phones much more than laptops or desktops. We have a very successful mobile app for our frontline workers.

We feel very strongly that frontline workers provide so much benefit to the economy and are the ones who truly drive it. We see a lot of data on our platform that tells us what is happening with them. For example, we have seen 12 billion clock-ins and 200 million people apply for jobs on our platforms, with about 20 million hires. This gives us a lot of intelligence on the economy. With the geopolitical conditions, we are also seeing more manufacturing move to India, which will significantly increase our frontline worker numbers in the next decade. Overall, while we in the tech space are focused on knowledge workers, a lot of work is happening to support frontline workers.

How are AI agents, specifically conversational ones, initiating the day-to-day operations of frontline workers?

When we look at frontline workers, we have to go very deep into each vertical because each one has its own specific needs. For example, a manufacturing plant has a very different feature set from a hospital. We provide very specific things that are useful for each vertical.

In manufacturing, we see a lot of frontline workers leveraging their phones. They are used to calls and a limited set of technology. We have a very successful mobile app that we want to make even more enabled for them. The idea is to create interfaces for their phones.

How do you see the role of AI in the modern workplace? Beyond the generic process of task automation, what is the potential of AI in terms of job satisfaction and upskilling?

With many people saying that AI is going to take jobs away.

I believe AI will become a personal assistant, a digital twin. It will add a lot more value than what we see today. AI will not only automate things but will also do some deep analysis that in the past only humans could do. It will get to a point where it will allow us to focus on the high-value, strategic work that humans should be doing, as opposed to the trivial, everyday tasks that take up a lot of our time. Today, we probably spend 50% to 80% of our day on simple, non-strategic tasks. AI should and will start taking a lot of that work. This will add value to the workforce because we will be able to focus on the parts of our jobs that truly add value.

I do not think AI will replace people. It is not like we will suddenly see a lot fewer people, but we will see jobs change and the requirements change. The jobs will evolve into higher-value jobs with a greater impact.

Is there anything you would like to add?

I want to end by saying that UKG is in India because we know this country has the best talent. Our focus is truly on talent and getting the best talent, which is why we go to top-tier colleges. The reason we need this talent is that we are driving a lot of innovation from India. Everything we have talked about regarding how we will use AI and add value to our products is happening in India. UKG is here for the best talent we can get to drive this whole AI journey.