Zomato Shuts Its Hyderabad Support Centre And Cuts 250 Jobs As Vendors And AI Absorb The Work

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Zomato has cut around 250 jobs and is shutting its in-house customer support operations in Hyderabad, with roughly 240 of the affected roles based at that centre. Employees were told on 31 August. The move was reported by NDTV Profit, citing sources, and separately by the Economic Times.

The company is discontinuing what it calls Customer Delight operations in Hyderabad and consolidating the remaining in-house support team at its Gurugram headquarters, where it will sit alongside product, technology, analytics and business functions. Zomato said the decision followed a review of its Customer Delight operating model and organisational requirements, and was not a reflection of the affected employees' performance or contribution.

The context is a shift that has been underway for months. Over the past six months, a growing share of Zomato's support workload has moved to specialised external partners. What is closing is a dedicated in-house centre, not the support function itself.

Severance terms are more substantial than in the company's previous round. Affected employees will receive their August salary plus four months of severance, comprising contractual notice pay and a one-time ex gratia payment. Medical insurance and counselling support continue until 31 March 2027, and Zomato said it would provide outplacement assistance.

This is the second contraction of the support organisation in under 18 months. In April 2025, Zomato let go of a large group of customer support associates within a year of hiring them, many recruited through its Zomato Associate Accelerator Programme. Reported figures for that round ranged from around 500 to close to 600, and those exits reportedly carried one month's compensation.

The sequence matters more than the number. In February 2025, Zomato launched Nugget, an AI-native, no-code customer support platform built internally over three years, which by then was handling more than 15 million support interactions a month across Zomato, Blinkit and Hyperpure. Deepinder Goyal, then group chief executive, said it could resolve up to 80 per cent of queries without a human. Two months later the associate ranks were cut. Sixteen months after that, the dedicated centre is closing and the residual work is going to vendors.

Read as a single arc, this is not automation eliminating a function. It is automation re-sorting one into three tiers. The model takes high-volume, low-variance queries. External partners absorb the variable overflow, which is cheaper to flex up and down than a payroll is. A small in-house team stays close to product and engineering, because someone has to design and audit what the model does.

That last tier is the part worth watching. A support organisation sitting next to analytics and product is a different asset from one sitting in another city processing tickets. It becomes a feedback loop into the product rather than a cost line beneath it. Whether Zomato uses it that way, or simply banks the savings, is the open question. The restructuring is also the first of this scale under Albinder Dhindsa, who took over as group chief executive in February.

For India's consumer internet sector, the significance is that the customer support job is being unbundled in public, at scale, by a company that also sells the tool doing the unbundling. Nugget was launched as a commercial product, the first out of Eternal Labs, and pitched to businesses worldwide. Every quarter Zomato runs leaner on human support is a live reference for that sales pitch. The alignment is efficient. It also means the internal decision and the external product story reinforce each other, which is worth holding in view when reading the framing.

The employment picture is the harder part. Voice and chat support has been one of the few remaining high-volume entry points into formal white-collar work for graduates outside elite institutions, particularly in Hyderabad, Chennai and Pune. It absorbed people the engineering and consulting pipelines did not. When that layer thins, the ladder loses a rung, and nothing obvious is being built to replace it. Ford's capability centre in Chennai said this week it would hire around 500 people in 2027, almost all specialists. The two stories point the same direction from opposite ends.

There is also an execution risk the cost logic obscures. Food delivery is a category where support failures are immediate and visible: a missing order, a wrong charge, a rider dispute. Tolerance for a bad automated interaction is low, and the reputational cost lands on the brand rather than on the vendor handling the ticket. Zomato has placed a large share of that surface with third parties and a model while keeping accountability for all of it.

The severance terms suggest the company learned something from April 2025, when a chaotic round drew criticism and reportedly offered one month's pay. Four months plus insurance and counselling through March 2027 sits at the generous end for an Indian platform layoff. That counts for something. It does not change the direction of travel.

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