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Hi {{firstname|everyone}},
I keep hearing the same line from accounting firm owners. “We want to hire for AI. We just cannot find anyone who understands both finance and data.”
The CVs are either too academic or too general. And the few people who have AI experience want salaries that no regional practice can justify.
Meanwhile, client expectations are moving faster than most teams can keep up with. It is starting to feel like two different worlds. The demand for automation is growing while the supply of real talent is almost non-existent.
That is where India’s GCC ecosystem becomes interesting.
GCCs are training a completely new layer of finance talent. People who understand accounting as a discipline and AI as a toolkit. This combination is rare in the UK today but it is becoming normal inside Indian capability centres.
Let me break this into three practical areas to focus on.
GCCs are building AI fluency into finance roles
In most western firms, AI sits outside the ledgers. It is either an IT initiative, a vendor promise, or a one-off staff curiosity where someone tests a prompt in ChatGPT.
Accountants in the west often learn AI in silos. They test tools on their own and invent ad hoc ways of working which means no shared mistakes and no common playbook to improve from.
In fact, a global finance-talent market study reported, 87% of finance leaders said their firms are experiencing a critical talent shortage in accounting roles, up sharply from prior years.
With GCCs, AI is built into the accounting workflow from day one. Trainees handle bank recs, invoice processing, and aged debt reviews, then learn how to improve those tasks with machine learning in real time.
Here is what matters:
Accountants learn to diagnose the task before choosing the tool. They know when a reconciliation issue is a data hygiene problem versus a pattern-recognition opportunity.
Internal “training labs” use historical client data. This means learning is relevant, not academic. It gets people thinking in terms of pay runs, VAT adjustments, duplicate transactions, accrual logic, not generic coding puzzles.
AI capability is measured against billable accuracy metrics. Did month-end close faster? Were there fewer flagged exceptions? This forces output-driven learning, not theoretical curiosity.
In essence, you are building accountants who think in terms of accuracy first and automation second. That is the only combination that survives in the real world.
AI Capability in GCCs is Shaped through Repetition
People underestimate the importance of volume. AI skill is not built by “training” in the classroom. It is built by seeing hundreds of edge cases every week across multiple clients and industries.
GCCs have that volume. Domestic teams do not.
According to EY’s 2025 survey of India-based GCCs, 58% are actively investing in agentic AI, and 81% are upskilling internal teams on generative AI and related tools.
In GCCs you have repetition at scale. It forces people to learn the edge cases and develop a sixth sense for anomalies. Over time, this produces accountants who do not panic when a model fails because they have seen failures before and understand how to correct them without blowing up the entire workflow.
The second important detail is feedback. GCCs turn AI mistakes into training material. Every error is surfaced, documented, and shared so the whole team learns from it.
This is why GCC-trained professionals look different operationally:
They learn exception spotting at scale. False positives in categorisation, recurring anomalies in bank feeds, unusual vendor patterns, tax inconsistencies across quarters.
They learn where AI fails. And this is more valuable than where AI works. Knowing when a model breaks gives an accountant judgement and confidence to intervene intelligently.
QA processes are looped into learning. Every corrected AI output is tagged, fed back into training documentation and cross-shared between teams. That turns mistakes into institutional memory.
The Affordability Gap Compounds over time and becomes Capability
AI talent in the UK is priced like software engineering, not accounting. The salary expectation alone blocks mid-tier firms before they even begin. GCCs separate cost from capability. You are buying access to trained staff at a predictable rate, but more importantly you are buying the system that trains them.
The real value begins when your GCC team starts identifying automation opportunities in your workflow. Your cost per unit of accounting output falls while quality improves because the hard, repetitive work is no longer handled by staff who should be advising clients instead.
Firms that continue to ignore this model will be stuck in a perpetual hiring cycle where they chase a skillset that simply does not exist domestically in any scalable way.
What firms do not realise:
A GCC team already includes baked-in peer training. One senior AI-trained analyst can uplift five junior accounting staff within months. That is compounding capability growth for a fraction of one UK salary.
The cost advantage grows the longer you stay in the model. First 6 months: efficiency gains. 12-18 months: process automation in recurring tasks. 24 months: internal AI SOPs in place. That is strategic capability, not just outsourcing.
You do not need “AI unicorns.” You need accountants who understand prompts, data preparation, anomaly identification, and workflow automation. GCCs already produce that talent at scale.
The result is a pipeline of predictable capability rather than one expensive hire who leaves and takes all knowledge with them.
How Samera Does It
If you are sitting in London or Manchester trying to recruit “AI accounting talent” through LinkedIn, you are fighting the wrong battle in the wrong market using the wrong expectations.
At Samera, we build finance-first GCC teams in India for accounting firms who want practical AI capability. We start with month-end execution tasks, then layer automation, insight extraction, and data hygiene routines.
You get a team that learns through your real client data and becomes better every quarter.
If you want to explore whether your firm is ready for a capability centre, start here:
Cheers,
Arun
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