Hyderabad pushes GCC momentum

Hyderabad is trying to change what its tech industry is known for. On April 9, Mahindra University launched an Economic Policy Centre in Hyderabad, and Telangana information technology minister D. Sridhar Babu used the event to pitch the city as a base for global capability centres, the in-house technology and operations hubs that multinational companies run from India. (timesofindia.indiatimes.com) The new centre is not a coding school or an incubator. Mahindra University said it is meant to connect research, policy dialogue, and industry needs, and its first event was explicitly about “Hyderabad: Powering India’s GCC Ecosystem,” with PricewaterhouseCoopers as knowledge partner. (fintechbiznews.com) A global capability centre used to mean a back office that handled finance tickets, software testing, or support calls for a parent company overseas. Babu’s argument was that Hyderabad now has the infrastructure, policy support, and talent pool for a more strategic version of that model, where the Indian office helps shape products and digital operations instead of only executing tasks. (timesofindia.indiatimes.com) That is why a policy launch and a builders’ meetup belong in the same story. If a city wants multinational companies to trust it with product decisions, it needs both top-down signals from government and universities and bottom-up proof that engineers are already building with the newest tools. (timesofindia.indiatimes.com) (luma.com) One of those bottom-up signals came from Workato’s Hyderabad buildathon. The company’s November 8, 2025 event in Gachibowli was a bring-your-own-laptop workshop where developers were asked to build an artificial intelligence agent with Workato Agent Studio, including skills, a knowledge base, and links to outside apps. (systematic.workato.com) Another signal is arriving this week. “Agentic by Eigen” is scheduled in Hyderabad for April 11, with demos, a fireside chat, and networking for founders and engineers building software agents, and the event is being co-hosted with Hyderabad DAO and Draper House. (luma.com) Those details sound small until you look at what they imply. A city full of workshops on software agents is training people for work closer to product design, automation architecture, and applied artificial intelligence, which is very different from the old image of an offshore team waiting for instructions from headquarters. (systematic.workato.com) (luma.com) Hyderabad DAO’s own pitch is also revealing. The group says it is working to make Hyderabad a “Web3 Capital of India” and says it operates in association with the Telangana government, which shows how local communities are being folded into the city’s broader ambition to market itself as a frontier-tech hub rather than a low-cost service centre. (hyderabaddao.com) Mahindra University’s vice chancellor, Yajulu Medury, described the new centre as a place where academic rigor meets real-world application, and economist Amir Ullah Khan argued that private universities should work more closely with government on research and training. That is the institutional plumbing a city needs if it wants global capability centres to run supply chains, data systems, and product roadmaps from Hyderabad instead of just payroll and maintenance work. (timesofindia.indiatimes.com) For companies with distributed product teams, the practical shift is simple. A Hyderabad office that can recruit engineers from Gachibowli, plug into university policy research, and tap a steady stream of artificial intelligence meetups starts to look less like an execution wing and more like a second headquarters for building things. (timesofindia.indiatimes.com) (systematic.workato.com) (luma.com)