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Summary
Opendoor's decision to wind down its 250-person India operation in favour of small, AI-native US teams has renewed questions about the future of offshore operational work.
US real estate technology company Opendoor is winding down its India operations, the company's chief executive officer, Kaz Nejatian, announced on X on Wednesday.
As a result, the company laid off nearly 250 Indian employees as the company decides to focus on ‘small AI-native customer-facing teams’ that work in the US, who will be close to its customers.
Is this a one-off for the company, or is it the start of something larger? Should India expect this to play out as a larger trend? Is AI going to impact India's role as the world's back office? Mint explains.
What happened to Opendoor's India operations?
A few months ago, Opendoor launched what Nejatian called ‘Opendoor 2.0’, in which the company built its own internal tools to automate and streamline business processes.
The company's India team was built to manage manual workflows and operational processes in support of the US business. The work was back-office in nature: processing, verification, and transaction support across a fragmented set of internal tools.
Nejatian offered two reasons for the company winding down its operations in India. First, proximity. He said operational work is best carried out closer to customers in the US. Second, technology. He said the company has unified its systems and built small, AI-native customer-facing teams across the US, reducing the need for a large offshore operational workforce.
Over the last few months, some of the roles in India had already been relocated to the US. The remainder are now being wound down. The company's stock rose 8% on the Nasdaq when Nejatian announced the news, and it closed 3.2% higher at the end of trade.
Does this impact how companies set up operations in India?
No. Opendoor's exit from the country, where it had only a presence of close to 250 people, will not spark a flight by other larger companies.
In fact, the country has been seeing a massive influx of global capability centers (GCC) over the last 24 months. According to Grand View Research, India's GCC market size stood at $69.85 billion in 2025 and is projected to reach $130.50 billion by 2033, growing at a compound annual growth rate of 8.1% from 2026 to 2033.
Similarly, EY, back in 2023, had projected that the total number of GCCs in India would likely grow to 2,400 by 2030, up from 1,250 in 2019.
Will AI impact India's role as a back office?
Depends on the kind of GCC that companies are setting up in the country. As agentic AI becomes increasingly prevalent, especially in enterprise settings, much of the operational work that has traditionally been outsourced to India can be automated.
“How fast this will happen remains a big question, because human change management and AI implementation is a lot harder than most people think,” said Jesper Ludolph, general partner at Exfinity Venture Partners.
Operations such as sales and marketing, supply chain logistics, and customer service, with unchanging workflows, are most susceptible to agentic AI transformations. This also means that work currently being done by humans can be automated.
On the other hand, GCCs, which take on a more research-and-development role by nature, are more complex and therefore aren't likely to be as impacted. “Companies are realising that they can't save on innovation. It's why you're seeing many European MNCs becoming comfortable with giving larger mandates to their GCCs here. We could potentially see GCCs working primarily on R&D expand significantly,” Ludolph said.
In fact, Indian GCCs are currently struggling to become AI-native, according to a report from management consulting firm Zinnov, co-authored with the National Association of Software and Service Companies (Nasscom). Currently, none are AI-native, while only 13% play a role in execution beyond enterprise AI strategy.
On the hybrid-AI operating model side, however, they're doing much better, with adoption growing from 35% to 70% between August 2025 and February 2026, according to the Zinnov report.
The base of the pyramid, process-heavy operational roles of the kind Opendoor ran in India, remains large. If AI tools continue to compress the cost of that work, the jobs-for-scale model that underpinned India's offshore growth faces real pressure, regardless of whether any single company's exit is AI-driven.
About the Author
Rwit Ghosh
Rwit is a correspondent at Mint covering India’s burgeoning startup ecosystem and the venture capital and private equity firms that back them. Sitting out of Bengaluru, he writes on the new-age tech businesses that the city and the rest of the country seems to continuously be birthing.<br><br> While Rwit’s interests lie in covering the new wave of deeptech, AI, SaaS and consumer tech businesses, he’ll write on consumer brands and fintech (if someone repeatedly explains these sectors to him).<br><br> When he’s not scrolling through the Indian startup forums on Reddit, Rwit is usually trying to figure out early signs of what’s to come next in the ecosystem. As a result, he’s been early to spot trends like VCs becoming more active in backing deeptech, funding bottlenecks for agentic AI startups and a potential revival in edtech through AI. <br><br>Prior to his ongoing stint at Mint, Rwit worked at NDTV Profit as a social media producer while also working on his own stories for the TV channel after he graduated from the Asian College of Journalism in Chennai. <br><br>When he’s not working on stories, he can be found trying to figure out where he should go to eat next in Bengaluru, or what his next tattoo should look like. If you see him in the wild, you should ask him how he pronounces his name. He’s definitely not tired of being asked about it.
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