Why the Global Internal Comms Profession Needs to Pay Attention to India — Now
The following article was originally published on Strategic, the platform for communication leadership globally, and is being republished with permission.
India has 640 million employees. That’s more than the EU, U.S., and U.K. combined — 410 million between them.
When we talk about the future of work and organizational communication, we’re talking about a country with more workers than the traditional Western economies that have dominated our professional thinking for decades.
And yet, when was the last time you saw Indian internal communications (IC) practice treated as anything other than an emerging market playing catch-up, or for that matter, any reference to Indian internal communication in the global IC conversation at all?
We thought it was time to correct that.
So we spent November and December 2025 conducting research across five Indian cities, speaking with approximately 60 IC practitioners, Global Capability Centre leaders, and organizational experts.
And we’re releasing that research today at www.nexticshift.com.
We certainly didn’t cover the whole country and don’t claim to have. But what we encountered challenges nearly every comfortable assumption the global IC profession holds about where and how innovation happens and what the future of our profession actually looks like.
The ‘Behind the West’ Myth Needs to Die
Throughout our conversations, we encountered a persistent belief among Indian practitioners that they’re “behind the West.”
They have no reason to think that.
IC in Western markets is in a similar place, has been stuck there for far longer, and has a lot more baggage in this area.
The Indian practitioners we met face remarkably similar challenges to Western IC pros: fighting for “a seat at the table,” struggling with output-based expectations, wrestling with measurement approaches that don’t capture real value. These aren’t Indian problems. They’re IC problems everywhere.
But here’s what makes Indian practitioners potentially more advanced:
They’re adopting AI faster and with more confidence (as compared to recent research in the West conducted for LumApps).
They demonstrate humility about capability gaps, positioning them for rapid learning.
They’re willing to embrace new approaches to dollarizing the value of their work — approaches that fly in the face of Western conventional wisdom that says that much IC work can only be valued in indirect terms.
Meanwhile, many Western IC practitioners are still measuring clicks and likes, producing newsletters nobody reads, and debating whether they should learn business fundamentals or simply expect that they’ll someday receive their due respect from senior leaders without having done so.
Who’s Actually Ahead Here?
Consider what we encountered.
One GCC communications leader in Pune is using AI to handle 50% of routine organizational emails, freeing her team to concentrate exclusively on strategic, outcome-based campaigns.
She’s not waiting for permission or a transformation budget. She’s reallocating bandwidth through resourcefulness.
Another practitioner pioneered “internal-first storytelling,” creating case studies that showcase R&D capabilities to business units that don’t know those capabilities exist, then repurposing them externally.
That’s IC as capability translation, not message production.
A consultant in Mumbai diagnosed the “organized communication crisis” — intranets costing serious money getting zero visits — and is helping organizations flip the IC function from corporate mouthpiece to surfacing the employee stories organizations need to hear.
And practitioners managing six to eight functions simultaneously aren’t treating that as a temporary hardship — they’re developing multi-function operating models that may represent how IC actually professionalizes under real-world constraints rather than the single-function luxury model Western frameworks assume.
These aren’t workarounds. They’re innovations born from operating without the cushioning that lets Western practitioners avoid hard choices about what actually creates value.
India is the Testing Ground for The Big Shift — Whether We Recognize It or Not
We talk extensively about what we call The Big Shift: the convergence of AI acceleration, generational workforce change, geo-economic transformation, and hierarchy pressure that’s fundamentally reshaping how organizations must operate. Organizations are facing a tight window for adaptation, where IC either repositions as a driver of distributed consistent and effective decision-making or gets sidelined or subsumed into other functions.
If you want to understand what’s coming for Western organizations as economic conditions tighten, AI adoption accelerates, Gen Z becomes a workforce plurality, and transformation timelines compress, you need to study what’s happening in India now.
The patterns emerging in India are early signals for what becomes universal as The Big Shift intensifies globally.
When workflows accelerate through AI but hierarchical approval chains can’t keep pace, bottlenecks become existential problems.
When Gen Z workers expect autonomy and clarity but encounter traditional command structures, a talent retention crisis emerges, especially when workers have options and organizations can’t rely on the kind of loyalty and patience that previous generations exhibited.
When coordination breakdowns cost the organization money, those costs show up in P&L faster with tighter margins.
Western organizations often don’t discover their IC approaches aren’t working until dysfunction becomes undeniable — sometimes years later. As these trends are hitting Indian organizations harder and faster right now, they’re starting to see a more urgent need for change and adaptation.
Indeed, the speed at which these trends are happening in many sectors in India make it the place to understand how organizations adapt when facing Big Shift pressures without the cushioning to absorb that impact.
Not because Indian organizations are more advanced — but because the feedback loops are faster, the trends are hitting sooner, and the consequences are more immediate.
The Professional Stakes Are Higher Than You Think
Let us be direct about what’s at stake for the global IC profession.
If a critical mass of Indian practitioners can maneuver IC to a more central positioning while Western IC remains trapped in engagement measurement and message production, this could be the best thing ever to happen to our profession.
Certainly the best thing to happen since the well-meaning but catastrophic MacLeod Report in the U.K. sent internal comms hurtling down the “employee engagement” doom loop in the early 2000s.
As some Indian operations seize the initiative when it comes to the Big Shift and successfully use internal comms to transform fully to AI-accelerated, autonomy-enabled, coordination-intensive operations — and as Western organizations cling to traditional approaches until crisis forces change — Indian organizational practice could soon become the global standard that others study and attempt to replicate.
The profession’s center of gravity could shift.
Not gradually over decades, but within a few years as organizations discover that the innovation they need isn’t coming from London or Palo Alto — it’s being invented in Bangalore and Hyderabad and dozens of different cities by practitioners who weren’t constrained by assumptions about how IC “should” work.
What the Profession Should Do — Starting Now
First, stop positioning India as some emerging market. Recognize it as a major market, talent pool, and innovation hub, and as a crucible where organizational futures are being invented under pressure.
Second, create infrastructure for cross-market practitioner exchange. Indian practitioners want business literacy and strategic frameworks. Western practitioners need to understand cultural adaptation at scale and pace, and constraint-driven innovation. Both can benefit from peer learning. (We’re starting that process with NextICShift, an India-based global platform for connection and knowledge sharing.)
Third, challenge universalist assumptions about IC maturity. Linear models developed in Western contexts do not reflect how IC develops elsewhere.
Fourth, pay attention to what’s being invented under constraint. The approaches emerging from Indian practice may be more sophisticated than those developed in resource-rich contexts precisely because they had to be.
The Choice We Face
The IC profession stands at inflection point.
We can continue operating as if innovation flows from West to rest, with “emerging markets” as perpetual apprentices. Or we can recognize that constraints often produce innovation that resource-rich environments never generate.
India forces this choice.
With 640 million employees and +7% GDP growth, organizational practices there will shape global business whether we pay attention or not. The question is whether the IC profession recognizes this while there’s still time to learn from it.
Our research documents positive, encouraging, innovative trends in Indian IC practice. It challenges assumptions about who’s ahead and who’s behind. The patterns we observed — functional integration, operational metrics, business literacy focus, AI adoption confidence — suggest not only that Indian IC stands at a genuine inflection point, but that the global future of the internal comms profession depends on what happens there.
The research is documented. The patterns are visible. The implications are clear.
We need to be rooting for India. And we need to be betting on it as well.