Bengaluru: American real estate tech company Opendoor announced Wednesday that it was shutting down its operations in India, less than two years after it expanded in the country. It’s one of the first major casualties caused by AI-driven layoffs in India.
In his announcement on X, CEO Kaz Nejatian said that since the company’s customers are in America, “that’s where our operational work belongs.”
“I am grateful for their dedication and this decision is not a reflection of the quality of their work. Our colleagues in India are great people, and we recommend them to anyone hiring,” he said. Opendoor has offices in Chennai, Bengaluru and Hyderabad, with nearly 250 employees.
Nejatian explained that the team in India handled manual workflows across fragmented systems. And now, these operations are being handed over to Al-native customer-facing teams in the US.
The company is providing transition packages including severance, outplacement services, and other resources to all those laid off. “A small subset of team members will stay on to complete the transition of key workstreams,” he added.
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The future of work in India
Investors and commentators labelled it “a watershed moment in AI Ops”.
Keshav Lohia, a venture capitalist at Emergent Ventures, said that the outsourcing playbook has changed. The move by Opendoor “shows how advancements in frontier models are paying off and how it affects the cost-arbitrage that made India a popular offshoring destination.”
Muthukrishnan Dhandapani, who rose to fame as Rahul Gandhi’s investment advisor, cautioned against panic but said it’s time to prepare for the future of work with AI, “especially keeping in mind what Chandra said about future TCS recruitment.”
He was referring to TCS Chairman N Chandrasekaran’s comment that the company will have as many artificial intelligence agents as human employees over the next three years.
But not everyone is convinced by Nejatian’s framing. TechCrunch reported that the company was contracting even before the India layoffs. It employed 1,042 people globally at the end of last year, compared with 1,470 a year earlier.
“Opendoor has been cutting costs across the business after a difficult period for the U.S. housing market that hit online home-buying companies especially hard,” wrote TechCrunch.
Opendoor’s India exit doesn’t need to be one or the other. It can indicate a slump in the US’ real estate market as well as a dent to India’s status as the world’s largest Global Capability Center market amid a rise in AI-native work.