Hello and welcome to GCC Unfiltered, the latest podcast out of the Xeno podcast series table. There's been plenty of noise around global capability centers or GCC as we know it. There have been numbers, headlines, hype. But what is really important is going beyond all of that to what really matters. In this series, we're going to be speaking to a bunch of leaders where we're going to get into the brass stacks of what works, what does not, and what truly matters. Hi everyone, I'm Nithika Goyal, the managing partner and CMO at Xeno. And I'm going to be the host for this particular series. Today I have an incredibly interesting guest with me, Rohit Kaila, who is the head of technology and the site leader of Wayfair India. What's really interesting about Rohit is he's probably seen four cycles of GCC's been around, has experience in the US, has experience in India, seen it when nobody really knew what a GCC is, built it from grounds up, is now set up a center and heading a center which has is riding the whole GCC wave. So he really has seen it all, knows it all, experienced it all. And what's very interesting is Wayfair is e-commerce or a DTC marketplace. And now going offline, where it's Rohit in his past avatar has worked in Walmart, which was largely offline that went online. So he's gone through this full cycle of retail and so I'm very excited to have him here today. Thank you Rohit for making the time. Thank you for having me. It's been an interesting ride, so looking forward to the conversation. Absolutely. But I'd like to start Rohit with like who Wayfair is and what Wayfair does. You've known very well in the US but an engineer is probably know you here but for the larger Indian audience who is Wayfair and what does Wayfair do. So Wayfair is one of the largest home segment online e-commerce retailer in the world. Large part of our market is really in North America, which is where we operate very strongly, very strong brand name known for very strong customer retention and loved by our customers. But essentially the whole idea being can we make sure that we are a place where people can shop online. We have of course as you said also doing physical retail to a smaller extent now but the whole idea really is they go to place for anything home and we have not diversified and said that we'll do everything but we want to specialize in home and do it so well and we are doing it so well that that is why we have a very strong brand name in that specific space. So Rohit I was also mentioning earlier on that you've been around in the ecosystem. You started your career at Bell Labs I believe right so very different than you moved in India I think you have worked with Walmart, you've worked with Intuit and now with Wayfair. So you've really seen different scales, different cycles, different industries. If you had to talk about your GCC experience in a nutshell and the evolution that you have seen in the industry could you share a little insight on that? Yeah I mean GCCs have gone through multiple cycles as you have said I actually for a very short period of time worked at Cadence anybody who finished studies in the US and wanted to come back to India used to come work for Cadence in those days Bell Labs of course had a center here as well I did a startup in the US startup in India as well. I worked for Yahoo and that was one of the early companies that got it really right in terms of setting up a great center in India. Walmart was a huge amount of transformation that a company that did not set it right eventually got it right but it took them many years to get to that place. Intuit of course you know very well run very well people I mean loved by the employees kind of company. What has really stuck with me over period of time that has happened is the level of talent that is available and the level of talent that has got trained is delivering stuff over period of time has been almost a monotonically increasing function and at many times almost exponentially increasing function. So when you're talking about talent, are you talking about the technical prowess of the talent, the ability to understand end customer thinking, the ability to lead in terms of the roles that they have here so if you can break that down for us a little bit more that will be great. Yeah so interestingly the first time I set up something in India was my first startup. I actually started my career at the start of with my professor in the US and he said you wanted to be in India, go set up a center in India and I was two, three years experience. I was setting up something in Noida in those days. To get an engineer who knew C programming to build something in those days was impossible. You could only find cobalt programmers very low end engineers. So when we say only engineering even engineering did not exist at that point of time. To fast forward today where you can get extremely strong product design as well as people having very very strong business context of what they are trying to do. And it has been a extremely good cycle where we've had a domestic market, especially in the retail sector which is very strong. So if we come to Bengaluru for example we find people who worked in Flipkarts of the world and Amazon.in of the world, we're very thriving local market, we have very strong business and product context and then you have of course the fact that there are other areas where people come in from there. So we have now built an ecosystem where you can pick any level that you want in that hierarchy and you will find people who are very experienced from a domain perspective, from a technology perspective, from a product perspective as well. And that ecosystem is so strong that I think other than the U.S. probably that ecosystem doesn't exist anywhere in the form that it exists in India and that has been the transformation that has happened. So then I do have to bring the elephant in the room, right? We're talking about AI, we're saying that we are going to be moving from a triangle or a pyramid to a quadrilateral shape where we're saying that young engineers will no longer be necessary with AI playing a lot of those roles. I mean there's a lot of conjectures, speculation of where this is going to lead. Given that India has been able to build a bank of such complex skills, how do you think this is going to evolve in the next few years as AI becomes more significant in organisations? This is the basics, we don't even have our own LLM, right? So government is investing, lot of academia is investing, lot of people are investing to say we should have some fundamental research in that area. That's an area that India needs to do better in. It doesn't apply to GCCs on many of the companies but in many ways it may impact that over period of time. So I think we need some work there where we are probably behind a little bit in the world in terms of where we are. The other side of the spectrum where how do you actually use generate AI to go build really great value for the company? I think we are almost at part, maybe in some cases, even above part in terms of what's going on. India has been identified as one of the digital, additionally very strong ecosystem that we are building. So I think we get a lot of people in that space that is there and we are learning with the world. We say that somebody else knows it better, I don't think is the case, I think we are doing it better. The part that I feel maybe we may fuel this a little bit more is we get a lot of fresh engineers. So a lot of people come back to me and say, oh, you know, we've stopped hiring freshers because that work can be done with generate. My theory actually is slightly on the other side. The people who are coming fresh out of college are actually a lot more trained in terms of using generate and building something than people who are at mid level. I am more worried about the mid level sort of folks who may lose their jobs because they are not willing to change fast enough. The younger ones on the other hand can become extremely productive because they can already start to perform at what people probably used to perform two, three years into their career. So I think that part which in India is a very big host that comes, as you know, we produce so many engineers, may be a tipping point to benefit India in a big way. If you are able to get that talent to really do very well here. So a very interesting thing, right? And just as an extension of what you said that I read, was AI replaces mediocrity, not talent. So whatever is there, so I think if you really put it, it removes things that are redundant and things like that. And if you have a person willing and open to learn it, the possibilities are significant. So that's a great thing. Then I'm going to ask you another question, right? I know that you have scaled fairly fast over the last two years. You have 500 plus engineers on your roles right now. The question I'm even asking is, what is the cost of speed? I think the key point there is define growth, right? A lot of people, unfortunately in India, we just come down to numbers, right? 500, 5,000, you know, it's just about numbers. I don't fundamentally believe that growth is about numbers. It's really about the aspect that where you are in the, where are you in the maturity cycle of what you're, you know, sort of went out to build, right? I can, people can set up an organization with 5,000 people in two years, what's a big deal? I just did 500, right? So somebody can argue saying, oh, I did 5,000, is that a better one or a worse one? Numbers don't matter at that point of time. It is really the maturity of the organization that you can build in the shortest possible time. Where more time means more cost, less time means less cost. So there's no loss. If you were able to go build a really mature organization very fast in terms of what we do. So what we did, for example, at Wayfare was, we decided that we wanted to build a very mature organization, so we want, we decided to start at the top. So I think you brought up a very important question, right, where you said, do it right. A lot of companies struggle with trying to convince global leaders of what is right. So in that case, where do you think the perception gap still exists? I generally feel it is largely to do with the fear of unknown. People who have done it before like, we were blessed with some of the leadership team in the technology space that Wayfare has had done this before. So then you have to be convinced, then you, whatever it going into, you have to just make sure you build the right blueprint. I think in organizations where people haven't done this before, there is always the fear of unknown because I am, say, I'm a leader in the US. I'm responsible for maintaining a certain organization. And now I take a big part of it and send it to a place that I have probably never visited. If it fails, my neck is on the line. So you were talking about the right talent, right people when you're building a company. Great people, great technology, great business, product market fit if you will, or just great processes. What do you think is the secret sauce of making a capability center or an integrated center if you will perform at its highest level? The base of all of this is great talent, right? If you are able to spot higher, grow and retain top talent, everything else comes from there, right? Because people build processes, processes don't build people most of the time, right? So at the end of the day, and talent is not a, it's not one size fits all kind of story. For what you want to do, if you are able to go and get that talent and are able to get them to be part of your organization and grow with the organization and retain, that will solve everything else. They will learn technology if needed, they'll learn processes if needed, they'll build those things. That's really what comes down to the bottom of it. I'm going to then ask you a controversial question. What happened with Yahoo in India then? Probably the best talent pool that we ever, or even globally, probably one of the most elite talent pool that we had, but the company still didn't make the cut. Yeah, I think leadership, right? I mean, when Yahoo was a founder-led company under Jerry Yang and others, it was, the leadership had a vision of what they wanted to do and subsequently that vision just valued it, right? Completely. Yahoo didn't know whether it wanted to be a media company, whether it wanted to be a technology company, what it wanted to want. It was never sure of, right? And then, final nail in the coffin was the last CEO who was not able to take the organization in a direction. It's interesting, right? We were in a market that was growing 20%. You had to be a genius to go down 20% in such a market. That's what we were doing, inspired to the best talent. So, you talked about leadership vision, having clarity of that, right? How important do you think that is for a GCC leader to have? And is it a one person's job, or how do you really think that group of leaders should be in a GCC to be able to drive and vision effectively, right? First of all, the central leadership is very important. Then the first year of operation of AFR, RCEO showed up in Bengalul. It's a small part of technology organization, the business leader doing that. He wanted to make it a point and come here. Just that one presence, we were 150 to 100 people at that point of time, getting together in the room, priceless, right? So that leader, my CTO visits the center every quarter. He's there in front of people asking, solving questions and being present. That is a very important aspect from that leadership level. And then that same model has to be replicated by the leadership as you go down the lane. It's extremely important to do that. When you have these surveys, you'll realize people will ask, you know, do you believe in the leadership of the organization, right? Once that score starts to go down. Now coming back to like HR and people and everything else, I want to talk about the dimension of AI, people, HR and how it works, right? Number one, I'd ask is there's a lot of talk about AI. How realistic and we did allude to it earlier in the conversation that Gen AI is sort of changing the way engineers are operating and working. How important do you think it is from a people angle, from a revenue angle, from a customer angle? And how do you see that change taking place or unraveling in the India GCC? The AI piece, you mean yes. I think at part with everybody else, right? It's making a fundamental change at every single level in the world, in how organizations are run, how people are actually addressing, how people are looking for information, how people are actually improving efficiency. It makes as much of an impact in GCC as anywhere else in some sense. And understand that everybody is learning, everybody is going through that learning phase by themselves and trying to figure that out and along the way, they will be very, very critical aspects that will come through which will start to hold ground. Today, if you ask a developer which tool you want to do, which helps you coding, everybody will give you a different tool and there could be many of those. So bringing that into your everyday life and making sure that you measure what you are trying to do is very important. Every developer can they measure how much is their efficiency improvement by using certain tools. That's a very critical aspect. So lot of people are focusing on the hoopla around it, let's do this, let's do it, they're not going back and measuring and saying, am I getting 20, 30% improvement or not? Am I making it my everyday life? Am I actually using those tools and changing them? So we, for example, give every developer an access to one of the couple of tools that we have given for coding. We want to make sure that everybody uses it. Some of them haven't even registered for it, right? But most of them are registering and using and we are trying to very, very carefully figure out how we can capture how we are doing that. People have to do that day zero. There is no more time left to say, should I do it or not? It is about how I do it. If you don't do it, you will become, I don't know, sorry. So a very important question is, right? Also as an organization and as a leader, what percentage of time and resources do you allocate to the problem of AI? Depends on what aspect of you're using AI for, right? Again, like I said, AI has been used forever. We use AI models and keep building AI models for marketing, for advertising, for everything. When we've been doing it for all the existence of our company as such, everybody's been doing that. There is no line you keep doing it. You keep improvising on it and keep building it. And there are new areas where they started, like all a lot of companies are doing tech transformation. Can you now say, okay, you know what, if I had to transform this stack to this stack, it would have me take, it would take me X amount of time. But if I use these tools, I can repeat it and work very fast and I can cut that time short by 30 percent. How do I? Right? There is actually no place where you draw the line. The important part is wherever you are at that point of time, make sure you measure the value of what you're getting out of it. Don't just do it because everybody else is doing it, right? So important aspect is keep measuring at every level and keep moving that goal post as you go along to make sure that your measurement is always ROI positive. That's a great point actually. So the other thing is like, now we're hearing the role of agents and especially with a lot of the work that you do, there's a possibility. How real do you think the concept of having AI as a colleague is, do you see that happening in, way, fair, soon, and what is that implication to the overall organization dynamics and culture if you will? No, it is, I mean, you are seeing this happen in everyday life. If you, nowadays, when you go for customer service, contact in any website, the first person you see is a agent AI, right? I mean, they are basically serving you. If aspect of what we do is getting touch wide, it's changing as we speak, right? It's as real because you see it every day. Like I said, again, it's a pivotal moment in the world in general, right? What shape it will go, there will be many, many visualizations of that. Nobody can say this is the only visualization that is correct. Be part of the process to build it. Don't be the person who basically just theorizes it or sits back and say when everybody else will build it, then I'll get there. That is important. It's a very interesting thing, beyond hiring. I think that's a great point. I think it's a very practical view of what is unraveling in the world today. And like you said, we can theorize for indefinite amounts. It's about just getting down to doing what is necessary and seeing what works for you. Also, it depends on what you are doing. If I was a company that is building an LLM, then my context is very different. Then I have to say, hey, where should I be 20 years from now? What is opening I doing, what Google is doing, then I should be thinking, but I am not in that business. I'm in the business of, I'm a retail business, right? So my this thing, I'm building a technology organization, I'm building business organizations. I have to have much more carefully curated thought process compared to something so bad. I'm going to now switch gears completely to the construct of GCC itself, global capability centers or GICs as they were initially known, a global in-house centers. If do you really think calling it a capability center is just glorifying grant work or donkey work that you are doing for the rest of the world? End of the day, if you look at all the work that a company does, it includes high end work, grant work and everything in the middle, right? Global capability centers have to reflect the same, right? If you only did some people come back and say, oh, tell me, what is India doing for you? India is not doing anything specific. I am a technology development center like any other technology development center. I will do high end work, I'll do grant work, I'll do everything in the middle. If you can replicate that slice as it exists in the real world in each of the centers, that's a best-centred event. The question I'll ask Rohit then is does a financial model support it? Like if it's a cost plus model, right? At that point, are we ever going to really truly be a representative slice as a GCC? I have a slightly different perspective on cost, right? Is that cost is a function of location in some sense. If you, we are a company that has, these headquarters in Boston, we also have a TDC in Bay Area, that cost difference is a large between these two locations. We have one in Bengaluru, the cost differential is different, right? Cost is a function of where you are and where you are operating in that point of time. It gives you some benefits and it gives you some challenges as well. And if you build out a, when you look at building out a great organization like Wafer, right? A great technology organization like Wafer. You go back and say look, I need leadership team, I need certain aspects of it, a lot of that is available in Bay Area. I'll pay the cost for that in that location. I have my headquarters in Boston, I have some great talent there, I have some great business sense there, I pay cost for it. And then India is probably one of the best places where I can have skilled leadership talent as well as execution talent and I'll pay some cost and build that in. If I build all these three effectively, I have a great company, right? If I only think about saying okay, you know, I have to now save 100 million dollars or 10 million dollars or 3 billion, let me go to India, hire some people and make it happen. That, okay, not a bad, many companies do it, I would not set up a GCC for that. I just, there are lots of services company that don't do a much better job at doing that. If you really want to build centers where your, you know, cost model as a function of the location, but more importantly, you know why you are going there, for what you're going there, you'll build a great organization. And that's how GCC is represented, that's fine. Got it. Now if I have to come back to just again, changing the entire direction, right? We've talked a lot about it from an operations perspective, from a culture perspective, from many eye perspective, from a talent perspective. If you could rebuild the India GCC model from scratch, right? No legacy, no politics, no playbook, no baggage, what would you do differently? It's an existential question, I think. Yeah, I mean, I think we have to put, we have to contextualize it in, in the company or the environment that we want to build it up. My theory is that two or three elements to build very important GCCs are, have a very strong business context of what you're trying to do. Right? If you want to do it from, most of the companies think of that much later down in the cycle. I would say getting into the business context is important because end of the day, your relevance depends on what value you're adding to business. Now I'm being a little bit, you know, specific to retail because retail is very business oriented model. So maybe some of it is based on that, but really it's see what value are you adding to business from day one. That's how you want to build it. Right? Second, you should be a little bit more location agnostic, right? So we should stop saying from India or Bengaluru or highlighting that it is another center for the company where, you know, talent pool is there and we are able to do that. God. No, I think that's a great point. And I think just constantly contextualizing and seeing what matters most to the business outcomes, customer outcomes and also what you can provide from a technology perspective, right? So I think I'm going to do a rapid fire with two sets of questions, right? And again, these are largely existential questions that we're going to ask you is number one, is if your GCC did not exist, how would you think it will impact your HQ tomorrow? I think where we are today, for example, where we are built a microcosm of our entire technology organization in India, if it disappears, that's the bandwidth of the technology organization that will diminish. If you had to think of the most significant or most important GCC roles that will come into play in the next three to five years, now I feel three years is also a lot, but in the next three to five years, what would those roles be? I think a lot more business leadership for GCC will start to get done from India along the way. There'll be any funky titles that will emerge. We saw that at startups in India, do you think it's going to happen in GCC's as well? But GCC's tend to follow titling based on every single organization, so they don't usually end up doing different titles here. What, according to you, will GCC's first, will the name GCC exist in 2030? That's the question, what will this collective cohort be called and what will they look like in 2030? I think it's going to very much be connected with the India story. So as Indian economy improves, it will be third largest economy in the world. I think a lot of domestic businesses will become bigger. GCC's will become part of the overall organization in terms of how we look at it. I think that it is going to become hopefully a lot more integrated because India will be a core business object for most companies. As a result of which, GCC's here will become very intertwined with business leadership in the region, overall in the world. And as with they do that, they also set up an organization here. I would then ask you two questions which are not in the script but came to my mind right now. Why do you think GCC's became such a hype cycle in the last couple of years? I think it's just that revenue base has been so large in what the GCC's are doing. A lot of the organizations decided to move away from only depending on partners and vendors for their work. So they wanted to set up their own organization because they could get better talent. So because of that move, the revenue became so large that it becomes a hype cycle. The moment there is money, there is always something. How long do you predict this cycle? One state. Do you think it's going to stay? It will be. It will just, like I said, it will transform. It will get more and more integrated into the overall India. So if you think of it, India being the third largest economy is very well integrated with the world economy and everything that is happening. GCC's will just become part of an other cent. They won't be a separate entity. So as a GCC leader, Rohit, while I end this podcast, obviously it's been a fascinating discussion. Lots of topics, lots of walling in terms of where we are going to be and what we've done right or wrong. What keeps you awake at night as a GCC leader? What is a person? That also you can tell us on the side. I think as a GCC leader, really the aspect is that, you know, how quickly can I get the right business context in the minds and everyday work of my people, of my engineers and my team to make sure that we become a very integrated part of the overall ecosystem in the company. That's a, like if a system goes down, right, is my leader or is my team as worried about it as somebody who's sitting in the U.S. is important for me, right? And as I pick those systems up, am I doing a great job in terms of making sure that I'm a very critical element of business continuity for the company, because when you are, then you want to make sure, first you want to be the business continuity person. And as you are a business continuity person, are you really paying the right level of attention to the company? Or is this just another job, right? That heart has to beat for the company to me, that is the only thing that is very, very critical. So with that, we end this really interesting conversation with Rohit Kaila. What does it mean to stay alive? We plugged in, we glued into what is happening and just have a fundamental belief. Your heart should beat for your organization, the problem that your customers are facing. And of course, the implication will, it has for the broader ecosystem. Again, thank you Rohit for your time. It was a lovely conversation. I personally learned so much. And I think I just love the attitude that you solve for what is here and now do it right, do it with the right elements that you have in place rather than just, you know, praying and praying in every direction. So I think for me, they have a multiple takeaways and it was a great conversation. Thank you. Thanks for having me. It was wonderful chatting with you. Great questions and great conversation. Thank you for tuning in to Zinov Podcast. You've been listening to our new series, GCC's Unfiltered. Stay tuned for more such interesting episodes. You can listen to our podcast on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, YouTube, or wherever you get your podcasts from. To know more about Zinov, visit our website, www.Zinov.com or drop us a note at
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