What They Did
Zomato is India's largest food delivery platform and, through Blinkit, one of its biggest quick-commerce businesses. Its parent company was renamed Eternal in 2025. Like every delivery app it handled a huge volume of support requests about late orders, missing items, and refunds, mostly through in-house and outsourced "Customer Delight" teams.
How LLMs Killed Them
Zomato built an in-house AI support platform called Nugget. According to Business Standard, it has handled more than 2.2 billion conversations with 85% automation coverage across teams. When that much of the work is automated, the call centre that used to do it has little left to do. On August 31, 2026, Zomato said it would close its Hyderabad customer support centre, affecting about 250 people. Its statement said it had "decided to reorganise our operations and rationalise the size of the team," and that the remaining support work would go to a single site in Gurgaon plus external partners. The severance was generous for the industry: four months' pay, an ex gratia payment, and medical cover until March 2027. Zomato described the change as a new operating model, but a support platform that automates 85% of conversations is the main reason the Hyderabad team was no longer needed.
Timeline
- 2020: Cut 13% of staff during the pandemic.
- 2024–2025: Built Nugget, an in-house AI customer support platform, and began offering it to other businesses.
- 2025: Parent company renamed Eternal Ltd.
- August 31, 2026: Announced closure of the Hyderabad Customer Delight centre, affecting about 250 employees; support consolidated in Gurgaon and with outside partners.
By the Numbers
- ~250 jobs cut with the closure of the Hyderabad support centre
- Nugget: 2.2B+ conversations handled with 85% automation coverage
- 4 months of severance, plus medical cover through March 2027