An American company has quietly closed its offices in India, and all of Silicon Valley froze. Not because the closure is big - but because for many it's the first clear signal that artificial intelligence is starting to eat what for decades brought work and money to India.

The company Opendoor, an online home-buying platform out of San Francisco, is shutting down its operations in India less than two years after opening them. CEO Kaz Nejatian announced a return of the work to the US, closer to clients, and a shift to smaller teams "born with AI." The company had 250 employees in India when, in 2024, it opened offices in Chennai and Bengaluru.

Why so much fuss over one struggling company? Because what's at stake is far bigger than Opendoor. India has long been more than a destination for cheap office work - it's the world's largest market for the so-called Global Capability Centers, with over 2,100 centers, around 2.36 million employees and nearly 100 billion dollars in annual revenue. When someone coughs in that system, the whole subcontinent listens.

Still, a dose of sobriety is in order. Opendoor has been shrinking for years - at the end of last year it had 1,042 employees worldwide against 1,470 before. The India closure could just as easily be a story about AI as a story about the company's own troubles in a tough real-estate market. Not every layoff is a revolution; sometimes it's just a bad year.

But the language of investors shows where the fear is going. "As manual work is replaced by AI, many jobs will be lost in India," wrote Sheel Mohnot of the fund Better Tomorrow Ventures. Another venture investor called the move a "turning point" for AI-run operations.

Phil Fersht, head of the analyst firm HFS Research, put his finger on the real spot: this isn't a story about jobs moving from India to America. "The more important shift is that AI is reducing the amount of operational work companies need at all," he says, describing a model in which firms run leaner regardless of where they are. "This isn't an isolated restructuring. It's part of a much broader pattern."

For the Balkans, this isn't distant news. The same model of cheap digital work for foreign companies - outsourcing, call centers, IT services - is one of the few branches that in recent years created jobs both here and in the region. If artificial intelligence really is starting to redraw that economy, the question "what comes after outsourcing?" won't stay only Indian.