38% of all Grade A office leasing in India’s top seven cities in 2025 came from Global Capability Centres — the highest proportion ever recorded. These are not cost arbitrage operations hunting for cheap square footage. They are the engineering, analytics, and innovation cores of Fortune 500 companies. And they are arriving with workplace standards shaped by campuses in Austin, Amsterdam, and Singapore.
The FM contracts waiting for these GCC workplace experience were written for a different era entirely.
What GCC occupiers actually want & what most buildings deliver
JLL’s 2026 GCC Guide puts the expectation gap in precise terms: 60% of GCC employees now prefer hospitality-style environments over functional workspaces. That means seamless visitor flow, frictionless access, curated F&B, and amenity experiences that feel designed rather than administered. It means the building responds to the employee, not the other way around.
What most Grade A buildings in India’s top cities actually deliver as GCC workplace experience is a patchwork of legacy contracts — one vendor for housekeeping, another for HVAC maintenance, a third for security, and a fourth managing the cafeteria through a sub-arrangement nobody fully owns. Each vendor optimises for their own SLA. Nobody optimises for the occupant.
This is the structural problem. Fragmented FM was adequate when office buildings were primarily containers for work. It is inadequate when the building itself is a talent retention instrument.
The IFM shift is real, but implementation is lagging
India’s facility management market is transitioning. The shift from single-service contracts toward Integrated Facility Management (IFM) is growing at a 9.3% CAGR — one of the fastest structural pivots in the real estate services sector. The logic is sound: a single accountable partner managing hard services, soft services, and occupant experience under a unified SLA produces better outcomes than a fragmented vendor ecosystem held together by a building manager with a spreadsheet.
But the transition is creating a dangerous middle ground. Many legacy FM operators have rebranded their service offerings as “integrated” without changing the underlying delivery architecture. They have bundled contracts without unifying data. They have added mobile apps without connecting them to building systems. The brochure says IFM. The building still operates in silos.
GCC occupiers, making 40–50% of projected Grade A demand in 2026, are experienced enough to know the difference. Their global real estate teams have benchmarks. Their HR functions track GCC workplace experience scores. When a Bengaluru or Hyderabad campus underperforms relative to a Manila or Warsaw equivalent, that data surfaces in location strategy reviews — and lease renewals.
Where the gap becomes operational
The disconnect between hospitality-grade expectation and legacy FM delivery is most visible at three points in the daily occupant journey.
Access and arrival: In a hospitality-grade workplace, a visitor receives a QR entry pass via WhatsApp before they leave home. They walk into the lobby, tap through, and are directed to the right floor. In a legacy-FM building, the same visitor fills out a paper register, waits for a guard to call upstairs, and stands in a lobby that was never designed for the experience it is meant to create.
The technology to fix this exists. The integration with building systems frequently does not.
Space and amenity utilisation: Meeting room booking systems that don’t connect to attendance data produce the familiar paradox: rooms that show as booked but sit empty while teams scramble for space. Cafeteria operations that run on fixed menus because there is no demand signal from the floor.
Credit-based amenity systems that employees ignore because the friction of booking exceeds the perceived benefit. At enterprise scale — across 100M+ sq ft of managed commercial space — the utilisation delta between connected and unconnected buildings is measurable in cost per square foot, not just experience score.
Helpdesk and resolution: Legacy FM helpdesks run on WhatsApp groups or email chains. Ticket ownership is unclear. SLA tracking is manual. When a GCC’s internal facilities team tries to pull monthly performance data to report to their global real estate head, they are often reconstructing it from memory and forwarding email threads.
This is not a technology problem that requires a major capital investment to solve. It is a data architecture problem — and it directly impacts GCC workplace experience, costing operators real money in contract renewals they do not win.
The platform requirement legacy FM cannot meet
The honest diagnosis is this: hospitality-grade GCC workplace experience integrated facility management is not a service delivery challenge. It is a data and platform challenge. The FM operator who wins the next generation of GCC contracts will not be the one with the largest workforce. It will be the one who can show a GCC real estate head a live dashboard of occupant experience scores, space utilisation rates, helpdesk SLA compliance, and energy consumption — across every floor, every day, updated in real time.
That capability requires a platform architecture that was built for integration from day one, not retrofitted onto a legacy contract model. It requires IoT connectivity to building systems. It requires mobile-first design that meets employees where they actually are. And it requires the operational discipline to maintain 95% platform retention across thousands of properties — because the moment an employee stops using the app, the data loop breaks and the experience gap reopens.
The FM managers reading this are already navigating the pressure from above: GCC clients asking harder questions at quarterly reviews, global real estate teams benchmarking India campuses against peer cities, HR functions treating workplace experience as a recruitment variable rather than an operational afterthought.
Digitising the GCC workplace experience
The question is no longer whether India’s Grade A office stock needs to close the experience gap. It is whether the FM contracts currently running those buildings are structurally capable of closing it — or whether the gap is, in fact, built into the contract model itself.
As a GCC workplace experience platform, ANACITY creates a traceable, transparent and accessible single source of truth. It gives FM operators operational data across enterprise-scale portfolios. The digitisation of workplace operations resolves the frictions of a legacy system.
This includes pre-approving visitors, in-app amenity booking amenities as well as Helpdesk ticketing. It provides FM managers with data on visitor entries, amenity utilisation and asset performance.
The more useful question for FM managers is this: when your GCC client’s lease comes up for review in 2026, what will your experience data say — and whose platform will it be running on?
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