Opendoor Ends India Operations, Fueling a Bigger Conversation About AI and Outsourcing (techcrunch.com)
- Reference: 0183749830
- News link: https://slashdot.org/story/26/06/11/070228/opendoor-ends-india-operations-fueling-a-bigger-conversation-about-ai-and-outsourcing
- Source link: https://techcrunch.com/2026/06/10/opendoors-india-exit-is-fueling-a-bigger-conversation-about-ai-and-outsourcing/
> In announcing the decision on Wednesday, CEO Kaz Nejatian cited a push to bring operational work back to the U.S., where Opendoor's customers are, and a shift toward smaller AI-native teams. The company did not respond to requests for comment on how many employees were affected or how much of the decision was driven by AI efficiency. But the announcement quickly gained traction across Silicon Valley, where founders, investors, and outsourcing experts see it as an early example of how AI is reshaping the economics that made India a global hub for back-office operations.
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> [...] Some investors viewed the decision as a sign of what AI could mean for India's vast outsourcing workforce. "As manual work gets replaced by AI, a lot of jobs will be lost in India," [5]wrote Sheel Mohnot, co-founder of Better Tomorrow Ventures. Others viewed Opendoor as evidence of a larger shift in how companies are organized. Keshav Lohia, a venture capitalist at Emergent Ventures, [6]described the decision as a "watershed moment" for AI-driven operations, arguing that advances in AI are beginning to challenge the cost-arbitrage model that made India a popular offshoring destination.
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> Phil Fersht, chief executive of HFS Research, an advisory firm that tracks the global outsourcing and business services industry, told TechCrunch that the development should not be viewed simply as jobs moving from India to the U.S. The more important shift, he said, is that AI is reducing the amount of operational labor companies require in the first place, allowing firms to run leaner organizations regardless of location. "This is not an isolated restructuring," Fersht said. "It is part of a much broader pattern we are starting to see as companies redesign operations around AI, automation, and much leaner workflows." Fersht argued that the winners would be companies that combine AI, software and human expertise to deliver outcomes without continually adding headcount, a model he described as "Services-as-Software." While Opendoor may be one of the first high-profile examples, he said it is unlikely to be the last.
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> Some investors are already extrapolating beyond individual companies. Varun Rekhi, a venture capitalist at Speedinvest, [7]argued that if AI reduces demand for labor-intensive services, it could eventually pressure one of India's most important export industries, which is built around supplying talent and expertise to global corporations.
[1] https://techcrunch.com/2026/06/10/opendoors-india-exit-is-fueling-a-bigger-conversation-about-ai-and-outsourcing/
[2] https://www.opendoor.com/articles/new-india-offices
[3] https://slashdot.org/~alternative_right
[4] https://x.com/nejatian/status/2064734707497996543
[5] https://x.com/pitdesi/status/2064819101076185256
[6] https://x.com/Keshav_Lohiaaa/status/2064776462096359456
[7] https://x.com/RekhiVarun/status/2064842788597059987
Doomed (Score:3)
I bought a DGX Spark recently and set up Hermes and few local AI models. After buying the hardware it's like having a team of Indian coders who'll work 24/7 for a few cents an hour. Slow and somewhat buggy but I can tell it what to do at night and come back in the morning and it's ready for me to review and test.
There's simply going to be no market for low-end outsourced programming services soon.
Re: (Score:1)
This is what I keep telling people. They have this crazy idea that AI will produce elite level code. It doesn't.
But it will do better than giving the project to Indians, so that is the real value of AI.
missing headline (Score:1)
A team of Claude Agents can produce code of the same quality as team of human Indian coders.
or
It is so great to blame AI for our failures.
or
Our US customer do not appreciate our Indian team
Opendoor likely trained LLMs off Indian employees (Score:2)
Which means we've come full circle - Indians training their American replacements instead of the other way around.
Re:Opendoor likely trained LLMs off Indian employe (Score:4, Insightful)
Could be. However, I have been at two companies where folks were forced to train their replacements. It's pretty horrible. You walk by someone's desk who has 90 days left (max) with the company and is doing the "knowledge transfer" to keep their severance. In one case that was a month's pay. In the other it was a week's pay for every year you'd been with the company up to 10 weeks.
The people doing that were super depressed and demotivated. Some where super pissed, too. I was afraid every day someone was going to come in with a gun because a few were truly furious and loud (like the guy who had a kid with cancer and was being laid off and losing his health insurance). Some just did what they were asked and then left. Others tried a bit of sabotage like the guy who "accidentally lost" all their smartcards that were used to unlock the Brocade Encryption Switches and caused them to lose access to the data on about 12,000 LTO5 tapes. That guy was laughing when they were all panicked and moving his cube furniture around to try and see if they'd slid behind his desk (one had but they needed 3 out of 5 to unlock the encryption).
I ended up having to manage about eight of those Indian replacements. Two were pretty decent. The others were pretty useless. So, about the same ratio as most Americans. However, the offshoring firm was screwing those guys. They were paying them less than they'd agreed to (taking too much off the top) and failing to pay them at all sometimes and leaving them stranded or without any way to pay their rent. It was pretty hellacious for the Indian folks, too.
It was really a dark and ugly job. Then the whole company got bought by a major Indian offshoring firm and they absolutely nuked the Americans and laid off every last one of them. I was a principle so they were at least acting like they'd keep me but I quit and ran away while they hesitated to keep my salary high. Negotiating salary with no job sucks.
I have no problem with immigrants or Indians in general. However, I do have a problem with the H1B program that creates an underclass to drive down wages.
Global UBI? (Score:2)
U.S. citizens might be able to vote themselves UBI from the profits of US AI companies but what about other countries? Maybe the country (India) puts a tax on all non-local ai models and uses it to fund a local Indian UBI. But then some people/companies might use a VPN to access the model without paying a tax. So how could it work??? Seems like countries without sovereign AI are completely screwed.
Opendoor (Score:1)
Who?
Re: (Score:1)
When is a door not a door? When it's AJAR. Hope this helps.
Re: (Score:2)
Don't let the door hit you on the way out.
Re: (Score:3)
They're basically a memestock whose value went up 1000% last year for no particular reason. Unlike many memestocks the value of the shares hasn't decreased much since then, down only 50%. They are doing the usual "we're going to transform this lazy business of real estate with innovation and tech including tolkenizing everything on the blockchain and completely take over and be the next amazon!"
Re: (Score:2)
Not to worry in India about all this.
I hear they're still hiring at the Kwik-E-Mart.....