Inside India's GCC rise with Zinnia's Josh Everett

Zinnia's path traces that arc closely: a 2014 entry through an operations-focused Gurugram center, an engineering build-out in Pune, a 2022 repositioning from BPO provider to technology-led platform, and a 2024 acquisition that expanded the India team's product scope. Today that's more than 1,900 people, over 1,100 of them technologists, working across engineering, product, and other functions — a long way from what Everett describes as the early “ticket taker” model of executing assigned tasks and handing them back.

He's equally direct about how he judges AI's payoff internally: not by counting productivity gains, but by whether it's actually removing friction from the customer experience, with roughly 40-50 AI initiatives underway spanning software development, underwriting, and claims. Talent, in his view, remains the harder constraint than technology itself — the real question isn't whether good engineers exist in India, but how effectively an organization brings that talent together against real problems. He also points to a structural shift already underway: more senior and board-level leaders now based in India, which he sees as evidence that decision-making authority, not just execution, is moving there too.