Opendoor Ends India Operations, Fueling a Bigger Conversation About AI and Outsourcing (techcrunch.com) 29
Opendoor is shutting down its India operations less than two years after opening offices there. Slashdot reader alternative_right shares a post from Opendoor CEO Kaz Nejatian: "I shared this note earlier today with the entire team at Opendoor. Today we began to say goodbye to our colleagues in India as we wind down our India operations. Our customers are in America, and that's where our operational work belongs." TechCrunch reports: 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.
[...] 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," 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, 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.
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.
Some investors are already extrapolating beyond individual companies. Varun Rekhi, a venture capitalist at Speedinvest, 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.
[...] 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," 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, 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.
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.
Some investors are already extrapolating beyond individual companies. Varun Rekhi, a venture capitalist at Speedinvest, 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.
Opendoor (Score:1)
Re: (Score:1)
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:1)
Don't let the door hit you on the way out.
Re:Opendoor (Score:4, Interesting)
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:1)
I hear they're still hiring at the Kwik-E-Mart.....
Doomed (Score:4, Interesting)
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
Re: missing headline (Score:2)
chickens.
they come home to roost
Opendoor likely trained LLMs off Indian employees (Score:3)
Re:Opendoor likely trained LLMs off Indian employe (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Re: (Score:2)
Severance, what's that! I've never worked for a company that had such a thing.
Re: (Score:2)
Severance, what's that!
In my experience it's only a thing that is given to employees willing to train their own replacements. As an American, I've never received severance myself because I've never taken a deal to train Indian replacements. However, as I mentioned, having seen it first hands it's a pile of money as an inducement not to stick your middle finger in the air and leave the day they tell you they H1B'd your job.
Re: (Score:2)
Global UBI? (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Oh the hallucinations! UBI is mathematically impossible even in the richest nation on earth, let alone a relatively poor country with well over a billion people. People who suggest UBI seem to think there is a whole lot more money in the world than there actually is, and that there are a whole lot fewer people than there actually are.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Sure, why not!
There's an answer to that. The stock market has a self-correcting mechanism. When it goes up to unsustainable levels, it inevitably crashes.
If UBI were to be seriously tried, it too would quickly reach an unsustainable level, and it too would crash.
No amount of pretending would stop *either* inevitable outcome.
Re: (Score:2)
To be fair the government believes this too. Why else would they just print money whenever the fuck they feel like it? That of course begs the question, why do I pay taxes if they just print money whenever the fuck they want to? It's all completely fake and made to enslave people. This hasn't been a capitalist country in decades, not since leaving the gold standard.
Re: (Score:2)
Hmmm well UBI may be a fantasy, and governments may print money whenever they want to. But "so they can enslave people" is a stretch. I don't think the word means what you think it means.
And the gold standard never actually worked. It led to inflation during gold booms, it led to *deflation* during times of economic growth, and left the US vulnerable to global financial shocks. People who bemoan the loss of the gold standard, are mainly wishing for the "good old days" that weren't actually so...good.
Re: Global UBI? (Score:2)
Everyone born today is in debt for hundreds of thousands of dollars because the people before them would t balance a budget and the government decided to print print print. They either work and pay that money off or they die in complete poverty. Thatâ(TM)s slavery. Itâ(TM)s debtors prison minus the walls holding them in. We are all cattle in this economy and they will either milk us or slaughter us at their whim. If you believe otherwise I feel sorry for you. Itâ(TM)s the economic version of
Re: (Score:2)
Your math is a little off: today's national debt is "only" $115K per person, not "hundreds of thousands" per person. That is, of course, still a lot.
But slavery it is not. Owing a debt does not make a person a slave. If it did, everybody who has a credit card or a mortgage would be a slave. And that's most people.
We know what it looks like when a country gets too far into debt. Argentina, Greece, Spain, to name three countries that have experienced over-indebtedness. Their outcomes were dramatically differe
Sounds awful, but... (Score:2)
The developers who can be replace by AI, will probably be better off doing other kinds of work. There are a lot of great developers in India, but they generally don't work for the outsourcing companies. These companies are India's tech sweatshops. As soon as they can get a "real" job, they do.
This is good, for every one in the long run. (Score:2)
I worked for 35+ years with US corporations and had every one of the (in)famous outsourcing clown shows as my vendors, inherited from my US counterparts who found them unmanageable from 10 timezones away.
My job was to get rid of these guys, and replace them with direct hires. Typically a team of 70 (don't ask me why they loved that size) would be replaced with 15-20 directs.
The business model - excluding the h1b issue - is plain and simple: salary arbitrage. In 2008 for example the USD was around 33 INR. To
Obvious solution. (Score:2)
If you need it spelled out - they already have the talent and expertise needed to start their own global corporations! Stop exporting that, start new enterprises, and export their products/services. India already has access to everything it needs to become
Re: (Score:2)