The case for going where the talent lives: offshore centres of excellence
When a company cannot hire enough senior talent in one location, it faces a choice it often does not name explicitly: lower the bar locally, hire thinly across many remote locations, or establish a presence where the talent is already concentrated. For frontier capability, the third option, an offshore centre of excellence in a talent-dense city, is frequently the strongest, and it is worth understanding why.
India is the clearest large-scale proof. More than 1,700 global capability centres now operate there, employing over 1.9 million people and generating an estimated 64 billion dollars in annual value. Crucially, these are no longer back offices. Fortune 500 centres in India already hold more than 126,000 AI-aligned roles, and global leadership roles run from India have grown at around a 40 percent compound rate over five years. The companies that built serious centres there did not chase cost. They chased talent, and the talent was real.
Concentration is the asset
Senior technical talent is not spread evenly. It clusters in a handful of ecosystems where universities, leading companies, and quality of life reinforce each other and pull talent in from elsewhere. That concentration is precisely what makes a focused effort efficient. In a dense ecosystem, a recruiter can meet several qualified people in a day and a hiring manager can run a week of strong interviews. The same effort spread across many cities yields a fraction of the conversations.
Concentration also creates a self-reinforcing pull. In a city where the frontier is the default conversation, knowledge flows freely and strong people attract more strong people. A presence there taps not just the local talent but the steady inflow of people who move to these ecosystems for the salaries, the opportunities and the life.
A presence changes the proposition
The deeper reason to build where the talent lives is what it does to your offer. Asking a leader to relocate to an unfamiliar place excludes most of your target pool before you start. Offering an opportunity in the city where they already want to be, with their network, schools and commute intact, includes them. The same role becomes attractive to many times more people simply because it no longer demands a personal upheaval.
This is the logic the most ambitious organisations have already followed. They did not try to pull scarce talent to inconvenient locations. They went to where the talent was, and they did it because it was the only way to access the full pool rather than the small slice willing to move.
Doing it well
An offshore centre of excellence is not a cost-arbitrage back office, and treating it as one wastes the opportunity. The point is access to talent that is otherwise unreachable, which means the centre has to be a real home for serious work, with genuine ownership and a credible local leader. The first hire matters most, because that person sets the bar, represents the company to the local community, and makes every subsequent hire easier. Get the anchor leader right and the centre compounds. Get it wrong and it stays a satellite that never quite attracts the people it was built for.
The strategic signal matters too. Establishing a serious presence in a talent-dense ecosystem tells investors, candidates and competitors that the company intends to compete for talent at the highest level. For a company that wants frontier capability, that signal, backed by a real commitment, is part of what makes the centre work.
How centres of excellence fail, and how to avoid it
For all the success stories, plenty of offshore centres disappoint, and the failure modes are consistent. The first is treating the centre as cost arbitrage rather than a talent strategy, which sets the ambition too low and attracts people who know they are an afterthought. The second is a weak anchor leader, because a centre led by someone the local market does not respect will never attract the people who could have made it exceptional. The third is the absence of real ownership, where the centre executes work defined entirely elsewhere and never develops the autonomy that ambitious people want. The fourth is isolation, where the centre is cut off from the decisions and the context at headquarters and slowly drifts into a second tier.
Avoiding these is mostly a matter of intent. Give the centre real work and real ownership. Invest in an anchor leader the local market takes seriously, and give them the authority to build. Connect the centre to the company's actual decisions rather than its leftover tasks. Done this way, an offshore centre becomes a genuine source of capability and even of company leadership, which is exactly what the best of them have become. Done the other way, it becomes an expensive disappointment that confirms every cynical assumption the local talent already had.
Going where the talent lives is not a compromise forced by a hiring shortfall. It is a strategy that turns the constraint of concentration into an advantage, and for frontier capability it is often the only way to build a team that is genuinely world-class.