Zomato had launched its own AI-based consumer support platform Nugget last year, and that seems to have coincided with some downsizing of its customer support teams.
Zomato is shutting down its customer support operations in Hyderabad, a move that will result in around 250 employees losing their jobs, according to a report by Economic Times. The restructuring follows a change in Zomato’s customer support model over the past six months, with a larger share of the work being moved to external outsourcing partners, ET reported citing people aware of the matter. Zomato is consolidating its remaining in-house customer support operations at its headquarters in Gurugram, and the Hyderabad centre appears to have become surplus to that plan.
Zomato hasn’t offered an official comment on the layoffs, and details on severance or redeployment options for the affected employees aren’t yet clear. But this isn’t the company’s first round of cuts to its support workforce, and each round has landed close on the heels of some new claim about what Nugget can now do on its own.
Nugget’s Long Runway Inside Zomato
Nugget was announced in February 2025 by Zomato co-founder and CEO Deepinder Goyal, who described it as an AI-native, no-code customer support platform built to let businesses scale support without hiring large developer or agent teams. Goyal said the platform had actually been in development for three years before its public unveiling, tested extensively inside Zomato’s own operations before it was ever pitched to outside clients.
At launch, Nugget was already handling more than 15 million customer interactions a month across Zomato, Blinkit and Hyperpure, and Goyal claimed it could resolve up to 80 percent of queries without any human involved. The platform combines a few different capabilities under one roof: image classification to sort and process complaints, automated audits of support conversations, voice AI agents that can handle calls the way a human agent would, and analytics meant to surface patterns in what customers are actually complaining about. Nugget was also the first product to come out of Zomato Labs, the company’s internal incubator, and Goyal signalled at the time that more such tools were on the way.
The company later opened Nugget up as a paid product for outside businesses too, offering it free to companies still locked into contracts with legacy support vendors until those contracts ran out. Zomato said 90 percent of businesses that trialled Nugget went on to adopt it, and the platform has since been positioned as a broader enterprise offering rather than just an internal tool, with Zomato pitching it as a low-cost alternative to the Freshdesks and Zohos of the world. According to a MongoDB case study on the platform, Nugget also cut Zomato’s own support costs by roughly $11 million, using MongoDB Atlas as its underlying data layer to handle ticket metadata and conversational history at scale.
A Pattern That Started Almost Immediately
The Hyderabad shutdown isn’t a standalone event. Within about a month of Nugget’s launch, Zomato had already let go of close to 500 to 600 customer support executives hired under its Zomato Associate Accelerator Program, or ZAAP, with the cuts falling across its Gurugram and Hyderabad offices. Employees at the time described being logged out of company systems without warning and told over Slack that they’d been marked “faulty” based on internal data, with some let go despite having no prior write-ups. The compensation offered was typically a month or two of salary, with no formal notice period.
ZAAP itself had only been set up a year before that, hiring around 1,500 people specifically for support roles with the promise of eventual movement into functions like sales, operations and program management. Most of those contracts simply weren’t renewed once Nugget’s numbers started climbing.
The current Hyderabad closure is a continuation of that same trajectory rather than a new one. The shift toward outsourcing, as described in the ET report, suggests Zomato isn’t necessarily replacing every function Nugget handles with more AI directly, but is also comfortable handing off whatever remains to third-party vendors rather than keeping it in-house. Between AI automation and outsourcing, Zomato’s own in-house support headcount keeps shrinking, even as the volume of queries the company deals with, across Zomato, Blinkit and Hyperpure, keeps growing.
AI-Led Disruption Of Customer Support Roles
Zomato isn’t an isolated case. Customer support has quietly become the function AI is eating into first, and the numbers being reported around it are becoming hard to ignore. Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff has said the company cut 4,000 support roles after handing the work to AI agents, describing it as a straightforward rebalancing of headcount he no longer needed. Jack Dorsey’s Block went further, cutting its workforce nearly in half and pointing squarely at AI as the reason support and back-office work no longer needed as many people behind it.
Indian companies have their own versions of this story too. E-commerce platform Meesho said it cut support costs by 75 percent after replacing human agents with a voice bot, while claiming customer satisfaction actually went up. Meesho has since built on that same push, with its CEO recently saying that 70 percent of its code is now written by AI, support automation being just one piece of a much wider AI-first rebuild of the company.
The scale of this shift has started showing up in aggregate data as well. Anthropic co-founder Chris Olah pointed out that customer support hiring has collapsed industry-wide, with the share of new hires going into support roles falling from 8.3 percent to under 3 percent in under two years. Not every company that has tried this has stuck with it, though. Klarna famously said its AI assistant was doing the work of 700 support agents, only to start quietly rehiring humans a year later after customers pushed back on the quality of AI-only service.
Zomato’s Nugget hasn’t shown any signs of a similar reversal so far. If anything, the Hyderabad shutdown suggests the company is moving further in the other direction, treating outsourcing rather than rehiring as the fallback for whatever Nugget still can’t handle on its own. Whether that holds up as well as Zomato’s Q1 earnings numbers have, or ends up following Klarna’s path back toward human agents, is the thing worth watching next.