Oracle started laying off its Indian staff last week, where over 100 employees were let go as the company focuses on AI and cost cutting, according to people aware of the development.
The numbers run up to a few hundreds across the teams, including cloud, sources said.
In a letter sent to employees, which has been reviewed by ET, the company said the job cuts came on the back of organisational changes within the firm. “Because of these changes, the decision has been taken to streamline the operations, and as a result, the position you currently hold will become redundant,” the letter read.
The company is offering employees 15 days’ salary for every completed year of service, and medical insurance benefits for up to a year.
This follows the global layoffs the company did last week, where hundreds of employees across offices were retrenched. According to reports, over 3,000 employees were laid off globally.
One of the laid off employees said that those associated with the company for 15–20 years were asked to leave. While the said employee’s exit was amicable with a month-long garden leave, others’ exits were reportedly not as smooth.
“We were told that these exits were not performance related but due to the technological shift, with AI coming in and the company looking to cut costs,” a source aware of the development told ET, on the condition of anonymity.
The layoffs have happened across the teams including Oracle Cloud. Oracle India did not respond to the queries sent by ET till the time of publishing.
Oracle employs about 30,000 people in India. The Indian entity reported a revenue of Rs 20,459 crore in the fiscal year ended March 2024, up 20% from the previous year.
Bloodbath in tech
Oracle is not the only company to have laid off employees. The past months have seen large technology companies such as Microsoft, Meta, and Salesforce retrench thousands of employees. According to layoffs tracking platform Trueup.io, 205,000 jobs are are likely to be cut off globally in 2025, of which 140,000 will be techies.
While AI is the catalyst behind the layoffs, it is not the sole driver of the current restructuring, said Phil Fersht, founder business research consultancy HFS Research. “Large language models and agentic AI are now capable of performing tasks that once required entire teams of coders, so companies are cutting those headcounts while investing in AI infrastructure. At the same time, global tech firms are under pressure from investors to show rapid productivity gains and protect margins, which makes workforce rationalisation the quickest lever to pull,” he said.