GCCs of Walmart, SAP, Thales, Intuit, and Barclays are rolling out learning academies, upskilling platforms, partnerships with top universities, simulation and virtual reality tools, hackathons, and shadowing opportunities to upskill their workforce in emerging technologies like AI/ML, cloud computing, data analytics, machine learning, and cybersecurity.
Upskilling employees is crucial to move beyond support functions towards global product development and drive automation, HR heads of these companies said.
Earlier this year, Walmart Global Tech rolled out its AI Academy portal, intended to support developers on their GenAI and AI adoption journey. The company also runs Global Tech Academy, its internal learning platform designed to upskill employees in future-ready skills.
“We’ve created customised opportunities for learning, coaching and tech capability development through our partnerships with academic institutes for high performers,” said Bharath BV, group director of strategy and operations at Walmart Global Tech.
The firm engages with Vellore Institute of Technology (VIT), Indian Institute of Sciences (IISc) and Indian School of Business (ISB) among others, he said.SAP Labs India – the research and development hub for the German software major – is prioritising key technologies focused on driving enterprise innovation and transformation, including AI and experiential learning, enterprise architecture, and solution architecture.“We put a lot of emphasis on experiential learning through hands-on projects, hackathons, customer-specific problem solving, job shadowing opportunities, internal fellowships, and open role rotations,” said Shweta Mohanty, head of HR at SAP India.
Employees have completed 35,457 courses and recorded 214,653 learning hours over the last year. Half the workforce is AI enabled, she said.
Intuit’s India development centre has an AI Adoption Accelerator (AAA) programme that focuses on AI proficiency in each and every employee regardless of their tech or non-tech role. The company is also investing in agentic AI, generative AI, and large language models (LLMs).
“We’re using AI to revolutionise our development process, and our GenAI-powered workforce has actually led to an 8x increase in developer velocity over the last four years,” Navin Anand, director of product development at Intuit, told ET. “So we’re not just building AI for our customers; we’re using it to empower our own teams to build faster and better.”
Intuit organises regular internal learning sessions on advanced topics like reinforcement learning (RL) and AI agents. It also hosts AI research talks featuring external speakers from universities, startups, and other institutions.
Barclays is prioritising emerging technologies like data analytics, cloud and AI/ML, and has rolled out digital credentials – digital learning badges and the Expert Engineer programme, which builds deep expertise across data, security, application and infrastructure.
“For GCCs, this focus is essential, not just to keep pace with innovation, but to drive it from within India. By investing in our people, we’re strengthening capabilities that power transformation locally and globally,” said Arun Krishnamurthy, head of HR, Barclays India.
Others like Thales are focusing on building advanced capabilities across aerospace, defence, cyber and digital domains.
The French multinational aerospace and defence company has introduced a shared competency management system, simulation and virtual reality tools, and hands-on training solutions to upskill employees in AI and cybersecurity, systems, pyrotechnics, radar and more.
“With a focus on accelerating our learning company programme, we aim to have more than 35 learning academies by the end of 2025,” said Sekhar Sahay, HR director – India at Thales. Last year, 90% of the company’s global workforce participated in skill development activities.